Next month, I will be leaving Grand Valley State to work for Springshare, Inc. I will be offering training and support as part of Springshare’s Customer Relations team.

As a Springshare customer, I’ve been really impressed by the dedication and innovation the team has shown in improving LibGuides – it’s definitely a better product than it was when GVSU first subscribed to it, 3 years ago. This is largely due to the fact that Springshare is very responsive to customer feedback – I can point out many features that were originally suggestions from myself, my coworkers, friends at other libraries, and other customers who posted suggestions in the Springshare forums.

I’m very excited to be joining such a great team!

Apparently, all the episodes are on YouTube.

I haven’t watched any of it yet, but this seems like a really cool idea. We should do a remake or something.

Serials Solutions has made agreements with various content providers; our content is limited to what those vendors provide.

Not quite. Simply put, Summon is like any other index. It does not matter which vendors your library uses to provide full-text access to your content; if content is indexed in Summon and the full-text of that content is located in another product, your link resolver should be able to make the connection between the two. It really doesn’t matter if Serials Solutions doesn’t have a relationship with the vendors that provide full text of that content.

Here’s a case in point, drawn from our database use statistics here at GVSU. Since Ebsco is creating a product intended to compete with Summon, they probably do not have a content agreement with Summon. However, our statistics show that use of Academic Search Premier has sky-rocketed since we got Summon. Fewer searches are being conducted in Academic Search Premier, but the full text is getting used more often. (My source for this is statistical analysis performed by my excellent colleague Doug Way. I strongly encourage you to take a look at his slides from a 4/8 webcast on Summon – I think it gives you a really fascinating picture of how Summon has affected use of our collections.)

I do believe that the intent of my original statement was correct – Summon is essentially a yes/no choice. When we implemented a federated search product in the past, we needed to determine which resources we wanted to “connect” to the search product; I believe many federated search vendors also have different pricing models depending on how many resources you would like to connect to.

With Summon, you don’t get to pick and choose. This makes sense – again, remember that Summon is essentially a really big index. You don’t get to decide you want 30% or 60% of MLA International Bibliography, either, so why would you do so for Summon?

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.

Serials Solutions has released an API for Summon. Although I have not had any experience using this API, I do believe it can be used to create searches with pre-defined parameters.

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…This could cause two problems [one of which is that] It limits discovery of specific databases.

Summon recently released a database recommending feature, which addresses this very issue. For example, you can see that searching for “computing” in GVSU’s Summon implementation brings up a recommendation for ACM Digital Library. This warms the cockles of my librarianly heart – while I love Summon, I believe that subject-specific databases remain the better option for certain information needs, and I appreciate that Serials Solutions is exploring ways to help people get to those better options when appropriate.

I hope my clarifications are useful for those of you who are interested in the differences between federated search and unified discovery services!

Apparently, Ebsco has had a mobile interface since last November, or so says this press release. I discovered this earlier today.

I’ve been playing around with it on my iPod Touch this evening, and I have to admit I’m disappointed.

I decided I’d try it out with Academic Search Premier, so I took my normal path to get to that database. I started at the library home page, clicked on Databases, then A, then Academic Search Premier, and logged into our proxy server.

My first disappointment is that Ebsco did not “realize” I was on a mobile device. I will try to be tactful here and simply say that I know of at least one major Ebsco competitor that has this “automatic detection” built in.

My second disappointment was all the steps I had to take just to search Academic Search Premier using the mobile interface. As mentioned above, I was not immediately taken to the mobile interface – I had to scroll down to the bottom of the page to see that link. I would not have known that link was there if I had not seen it earlier today in the “normal” Ebsco interface.

So, once I click on the link for the mobile interface, I’m asked to select databases. So, despite the fact that I came from Academic Search Premier, I have to indicate, again, that I want to search Academic Search Premier.

Finally, I find myself at the search screen. I’m non-plussed by the options I see there – the first option is to Choose Databases. Again. The second option is Search Options, which turns out to have all the helpful stuff. The third option is Field Codes, a phrase even I, expert user, didn’t catch the meaning of immediately. The fourth option is Preferences. After reviewing those preferences, I can’t imagine why I would ever want to change them.

At the bottom of the search screen there’s a link that takes you back to the top of the page. This is somewhat amusing to me. The EBSCO banner, the search box, the aforementioned options – they all fit on one screen (vertically, anyway – horizontally, not so much). The only thing of import I see when I scroll down…is the link back up to the top of the page.

Now, despite my disappointment at the search, I would like to say that I think the results of a search look nice, and the full text (when it exists) formats nicely on my iPod, at least if the full text is in PDF format. (HTML Full Text looks a little narrow on my iPod.)

Sol notes that he “didn’t realize that federated search doesn’t work.” I wanted to clarify what I meant by that comment in my last post; I did not mean to imply that federated search as a whole does not work. I meant to refer to a very specific set of tools created by well-known library vendors. (Also, I did not mean to imply that their products don’t work, per se, but that I don’t think they’re very good at meeting the needs of our users.) If I understand their technology correctly, both Google Scholar and Scirus are federated search technologies (please correct me if I’m wrong) and I have found both of these tools to work well.

Many thanks to Sol for being good-natured about my comment while still making me realize I should have been more precise in my statements!

1.Multiple systems, or at the very least, the appearance of multiple systems, are enemies to usability.

I recently had a conversation with my colleague Lynell. We were discussing library tutorials, and criteria to use in deciding when a process should be explained in a screencast versus and when a process should be explained in simpler media (with text & screenshots). One thing Lynell recommended is that in making this decision, I should consider the number of systems the user needs to cross.

For example, I’m working on a script for a screencast tutorial on citation chasing. Our user starts with the library home page (our CMS acts as system #1), then searches our A-Z journal list (system #2) and hopefully is then taken to a database which contains the full text (system #3a). Of course, that database might not always work (WILSON SELECT PLUS, I’m looking at you) which means the user then has to go back to system #2 and then pick system #4a. If we don’t have the full text, the user then has to search the catalog to see if we have the journal in print (system #3b) and if we don’t, they need to use document delivery to request it (system #4b).

That strikes me as needlessly complicated. Our users don’t need to know that they’re traversing from the CMS pages to a journal list to FirstSearch. They don’t need to know that our document delivery system is called Illiad. They just need the blasted article. Furthermore, the more systems the user must traverse, the more complicated troubleshooting becomes for library staff. Few of our users are sophisticated enough searchers that they know why their searches failed somewhere along the line. They only know they had technical issues. I’m sure a lot of time they don’t even know that – or if they do, they just give up and try something else.

2. As a corollary to my first statement, indexing databases are a bane to usability.

In my past life, I was a reference librarian. I did instruction and liaised with several departments. I certainly understand the need for subject-specific resources. I don’t advise abolishing them. Unified discovery systems can’t do everything – I mentioned Summon to a group of senior-level geology students last semester, but I herded them toward GeoRef to find articles, and Web of Science to determine the impact of those articles. Summon would have brought too much “noise” into the equation.

All of that said…resources like Philosopher’s Index get my dander up, simply because they add another system into the equation.

Furthermore, the fact that most vendors that provide seamless links to full text resources in other databases makes this situation more complex. For example, America: History & Life is a resource my library subscribes to through Ebsco. Some of the citations that come up when I search, then, have full text – because they’re linked to the full text we have in other Ebsco databases like Academic Search Premier. One one hand, I really like this, because it means fewer systems for the user to traverse. On the other hand, the citations that have full text are not necessarily the best citations. Also, it means I may have to explain to users why some articles have the full text and others don’t. Do you think they care? I don’t think so. They want what’s there.

As I mentioned above, I was a reference librarian in my past life – and I want to help our users find the best resources for their information needs. But I know that they’re going to go for the resources that are easiest to get their hands on. So let’s try to work toward making the best resources easier to get to, hmm?

3. Vendor branding is at odds with the mission of most libraries.

Going back to my first point – we at least need the appearance of fewer systems. This means that we need more power to customize. More power to make systems look like one another.

Going back to my second point – I want to help lead our users toward the best resources. Vendor branding seems at odds with this goal – especially since it’s vendor branding and not resource branding. If I threw a screenshot of a search screen for Academic Search Premier up on fivesecondtest, what do you think people would notice first, the prominent blue EbscoHost icon, or the bold print that reads Academic Search Premier? This isn’t helpful to our users who want to go back to the resource they used before.

Unfortunately, I’ve also seen that our users become used to using a particular resource because it’s memorable – because the vendor branding has worked. Unfortunately, again, the “easy” resource isn’t always the best resource.

JSTOR’s a good example of this. I suspect, knowing what I’ve heard from friends and users,  that it’s one database that student use for everything, because they don’t know we have other resources that might be better. In the LibGuides survey we conducted back in 2008, one of the questions we asked of our users was whether they preferred links to databases or links with descriptions of the database. I used a few screenshots of links to JSTOR as an example. My description of JSTOR, which I’d written for a stats guide, I think, read, “JSTOR is a multi-disciplinary database, but has some scholarly literature in mathematics and statistics. Be warned, though – JSTOR is an archive and does not contain articles published in the last 5 years.” Although we learned that our students do want database descriptions, we also learned that a lot of people didn’t know that JSTOR didn’t contain recent articles (via the comments). They knew JSTOR existed, but not what it was.

They think JSTOR, they EBSCO; they don’t think library. That’s not going to help them when they graduate and they don’t have access to these resources anymore.

I see why it’s in the vendors’ best interest to make themselves visible and memorable, but it’s not helping our users get to the best information, and I have a problem with that.

4. Metadata needs a makeover.

One of the reasons I think unified discovery systems work (well, okay, why Summon seems to work – I can’t comment on others) is because the search engine is working off of a single index which at least has some consistency in how metadata is presented and searched. I think one of the reasons federated search doesn’t work is because the metadata is coming from so many different sources that it just can’t be translated consistently. It seems a huge waste of time that vendors have people working on connectors to read that metadata and parse it. Why can’t we just create the metadata in a consistent fashion in the first place? OpenURL is supposed to help with this, if I understand correctly, but it doesn’t seem like enough. I honestly don’t know what the faults and pitfalls of MARC and AACR2 are, but I do know that it doesn’t matter whether I’m searching Worldcat.org or Millennium or an Evergreen system – if I search for “Cookery for one” as a subject, I will find books on cooking for one. I have no such luck with articles. Furthermore, I don’t know who the heck is indexing these articles. It seems to me that most of WorldCat is user-contributed records, right? I have more faith in something that’s crowd-sourced than I do in something that’s vendor-sourced.

I’d also like to see some usability studies on what metadata is actually useful for users (tables of contents? book covers? etc.) or where a lack of metadata stands in the way of users finding good resources.

I’m not really sure what plan of action I can take to accomplish these goals, at least at this point. I’m not even sure if these are things other people think are problems. Do you agree with me? Do you disagree? Care to elucidate strange inner workings of Library Land that I do not understand?

Like the tone of a spoken voice, the characteristics of a typeface convey meaning. The design of the typeface is, in itself, its voice. Often this voice speaks louder than the text itself. Thus when designing a “Do Not Enter” sign the use of a heavy-stroked, attention-commanding font such as Impact or Arial Black is appropriate. Typesetting such a message in Comic Sans would be ludicrous. Though this is sort of misuse is frequent, it is unjustified. Clearly, Comic Sans as a voice conveys silliness, childish naivete, irreverence, and is far too casual for such a purpose. It is analogous to showing up for a black tie event in a clown costume.

When you’re applying for a position, creating an official document, even handouts – is that the impression you want to convey? Silliness? Childishness? I don’t think so. So please JUST DON’T USE THE FONT. Even the guy who inspired the font (Dave Gibbons) thinks it’s ugly!

This Public Service Announcement has been brought to you by the Library Society of the World.

My place of work uses Blackboard 9, and as I understand it, our university was one of the first to use this version, as it is pretty new.

Despite the fact that we seem to have the newest version of Blackboard available, Blackboard can’t grok the RSS 2.0 specification. In other words, Summon search alert feeds won’t work in Blackboard.

I find this ridiculous and utterly disappointing – the RSS 2.0 specification is not precisely new. According to documents I’ve found, the specifications for RSS 2.0.1 were released in July 2003 – about six and a half years ago.

I’m also an e-book reader – I have the Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and Stanza e-reader apps on my iPod Touch. I enjoy the flexibility of being able to read with one hand (the other is usually commandeered by the cat); the privacy, since there’s no book cover proclaiming to the world that I’m reading a bodice ripper on my lunch break; the instant gratification, as my nearest big box book store is 10 miles away.

Library user…e-book reader. Seems reasonable to assume that library users that also like e-books might, I don’t know, want to check out e-books and read them on their Kindles, iPods, Nooks, etc.

Can someone explain to me why no one is doing this? I know some libraries are circulating the Kindle devices themselves – but that leaves libraries stuck with the model of having to loan physical objects.