Comments on: Ranting about library technology

By: Roddy MacLeod

Roddy MacLeod — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:33:41 +0000

“They just need the blasted article.” Well put! University library systems tend to be far too complicated for the average (and I emphasise ‘average’ in this context) student. Also, too many university library websites suck http://roddymacleod.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/many-university-library-websites-suck/

By: Joshua Allen Holm

Joshua Allen Holm — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:05:20 +0000

Sorry, yet another addendum, the issue of the search box failing to work appears to be a Webkit specific issue, so Safari and Chrome, won’t work right, but Firefox does. I’ll stop spamming your blog, now…

By: Joshua Allen Holm

Joshua Allen Holm — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:01:44 +0000

Should have phrased that better, I meant how Summons and Encore handle materials that are translations from other languages… not how it handles actual non-English resources, though I imagine that would present problems too. Try searching for “Palace Walk” in summons, click on the Mahfuz author link, this will bring up all the Mahfouz novels in GVSU’s collection, click on the search library button with the search box filled in with data summons put there, and watch as it completely fails to find anything for the query.

By: Joshua Allen Holm

Joshua Allen Holm — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:12:25 +0000

One(ish) issue that really annoys me about GVSU’s technology specifically is how Summons and Encore are handling non-english language materials. In Encore, when I search for “Maḥfūẓ, Najīb, 1911-2006″ and select a title, it gives me a nice sidebar called browse results in which every title is in transliterated Arabic (I think it is pulling the title from the MARC 240 field and dropping subfield l), none of the books are Arabic Language editions. Summons, when attempting to search for the same author (a rather complex task since the only way I can get his novels to show up at all is to search for the title of one of his books and click on the author link in the results, because summons really, really, really doesn’t like most of the variants of his name, including the authorized form from the LOC Authorities), gives me the option to limit my results to English or Arabic language materials, with every single book being classified as both even though, again, none of them are in Arabic (it is probably getting its language info from the 041, even though it should probably be ignoring subfield h).

By: Alice Tyrell

Alice Tyrell — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:16:39 +0000

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

amen! I’ve been in a similar place trying to write clear instructions for / advertise the range and depth of resources available, and wow does that bring home the point! E-journal resources are fantastic, but there *has* to be a better way of presenting them to users than the current hodge-podge of an edifice!

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:25:42 +0000

While I can understand the theory that records in WorldCat are crowd-sourced I, in practice, consider them no more crowd-sourced than vendor database records. Very few records are actually upgraded/changed in WorldCat itself. People either fix it locally and don’t reshare or they create another duplicate record. And I do mean “another duplicate.”

The state of the WorldCat db is a complete mess!! And their profligate dumping of non-US records (esp. German; Mein Gott!) into the db willy-nilly — seemingly only to increase their count — is making it even worse.

But as to your general points, I fully agree. What do users need/want? Honestly, we still don’t know.