(archived webinar and slides)

Third of a three-part series of webinars on open source library systems sponsored by Infopeople Califa, and the Open Source Library Consortium.  The goal of the webinar was to share information about free and open source software that extends the capabilities of the library’s current ILS, whether it is an open source system like Koha or Evergreen or a proprietary system like Millennium, CARL, or Horizon.    The webinar focused primarily on discovery interface and metasearch products.

If you haven’t seen the new Amazon Windowshop site, you gotta click on over right away. This is where we are going. It’s a complete experience. The user has complete control plus it has audio (music and spoken word) AND it includes great CD and book cover images as well as movie clips. Using space bar to get a bigger view of the items grouped together. Click the space bar again to zoom in. It’s fun, it looks great and it walks and talks and sings!
Oh, and you can click on stuff to buy it or download it. So, it’s simple too.
Now, while you are there…think about this. Imagine that (as you click the right arrow key) you are scrolling through material from your catalog in Dewey order (okay, imagine something even better than Dewey). Using the up arrow key takes you to related material (e.g. “See Also”).
I’m thinking this would make a very nice addition to Amazon’s Web Services product offering.

2007-2008.  Managed Home Delivery Pilot project, a project funded by an LSTA grant to evaluate the cost and benefits of providing home delivery for library materials. Project was cancelled due to integration issues with integrated library system.

I’ve been using the expression “learned helplessness” a lot lately because that’s how I see the situation libraries have found themselves in after a decade of integrated library systems.
I find it particularly disturbing because so much of the work I do seems to bump into roadblocks that point squarely at the ILS. And worse than the roadblock is the shoulder shrugging of so many of the library folk using that ILS software.
Too many worthy projects have died because the currently available integrated library systems (ILS) available today from commercial, proprietary vendors don’t and won’t support libraries and the services they’ve like to be providing to their customers.
I’ve worked with libraries that wanted to do a study of how home delivery affected outreach and circulation but the interface between patron database and mailing service software was lousy. Actually, it wasn’t lousy, it was non-existent. My client had no way to output their patron data to a mail manager program in order to handle postage, tracking and shipment management. Pretty basic stuff – output data in a standard format like comma or tab delimited or xml.
I’ve watched people handing hold requests and interlibrary loan requests fight with their ILS and their resource sharing software and creating short bibs and fake patron IDs — all manual – just so users could benefit from consortial relationships. If every vendor supported NCIP, this ridiculous duplicate data entry wouldn’t be necessary.
And how many times have I seen the herculean efforts of library IT staff in generating usable routing slips for their staff so that each hold or transit item doesn’t need to have to be written out by hand by some unlikely library clerk.
This is all pretty basic stuff. It’s ridiculous that libraries are stuck with the systems they’ve got without options to determine what changes get made or even the access or privileges that would allow them to make the changes for themselves.
Enter Open Source library systems.
This all changes when libraries start building, supporting, and contributing to the development of their own software. Georgia PINES and the Koha libraries proved it could be done. Now, it is time we all got involved.
Here’s what needs to be done:
1) develop strong IT staff in your library or consortia who can read code, write code, beta test, write specs, and/or find bugs.
2) get over the fear of Open Source. Do some reading about how Open Source development works (read The Cathedral and the Bazaar). Find out about the migration and support options available from vendors like Equinox, LibLime, Care Affiliates.
3) jump in and play. Koha and Evergreen can be downloaded and you can take a look for yourself. That’s one of the amazing things about Open Source. You get to look it over inside and out. No big surprises three months after you’ve negotiated a $200,000-$300,000 deal.
4) talk amongst yourselves. Open Source projects rely on a community of users who are involved in the product. We don’t want Liblime and ESI to replace the other ILS vendors. We want to control the products ourselves and that means getting very much involved. Find the product that excites you and hook up with similarly situated libraries. For example, the Evergreen community is leading the way for large consortia (see http://open-ils.org/) , King County (WA) is heading up the effort for large, high-volume libraries (check out their OSS4PL site). There were many meetings ALA 2008 in Anaheim focused on Open Source, and more are planned at Midwinter, LITA, Access and other conferences so you isn’t hard to get plugged in somewhere.
The point is…do something! This is probably the biggest opportunity we’ve had to revolutionize how we do business since the advent of the ILS. But now, after ten years of learned helplessness, it is time to take control back.

I found this via the LibrarianInBlack’s FeedBlitz (which is the only reason I manage to keep up with her postings) and it is so cool, I had to pass it along. She says:
David Lee King wrote about adding the MeeboMe Widget to his library’s catalog. It shows up whenever there is an unsuccessful keyword search. This way your users have on-screen access to live help from library staff when and where they often need it–while using our confusing and multi-layered catalogs.

LiB points out that the the catalog is the primary point of contact for our customers/users so this little widget ensures that they have access to a real human being whenever they need it. I love it.

The only glitch I found with how it has been implemented at Topeka & Shawnee is that very few searches result in 0 hits because they convert your query to a browse query and display titles that are maybe close to what you were going for. I had a hard time coming up with a search that gave me nada so I could see the MeeboMe widget pop up. With such a resource at the ready, maybe it isn’t necessary to convert all the searches to browse mode….

In her 1996 article entitled Why Are Online Catalogs Still Hard to Use? (Journal of the American Society for Information Science 47(7):493-503, 1996), Christine Borgman discusses the fact that OPACs are used for “querying” when in fact what the public needs is a tool that facilitates the complete process of “information seeking.” She explains that researchers have found that “users formulate questions in stages, gradually coming to the point where they can begin to articulate a query.” She goes on to say that the search process should be iterative so that “searching may serve to refine the question rather than build a set of documents that matches an explicit query.”

When catalogs were computerized, they were developed for information professionals. Back then, the librarian served as the intermediary between the catalog and the user and the librarian’s job was to conduct the reference interview and then, having identified the information need, construct a query responsive to that need.

But somewhere along the way, we have moved away from that model of librarian as intermediary and the tools originally designed for professionals are now in the hands of “perpetual novices” (Borgman, 1996). You see, vendors know how to leverage their products. They took the interface designed for professionals, added some neat new graphical elements like buttons and dropdown menus, labelled it an OPAC, put a big fat pricetag on it and bingo the public interface was delivered. [Addendum...one vendor is actually trying to do something completely different that is more responsive to user seeking behavior...checkout TLC's AquaBrowser.]

So, what happened to that all important step of the reference interview in this new OPAC world? Hmmmm, bye-bye.

But at what point is it the responsibility of the information professionals to demand that the vendors actually design an OPAC for users. An OPAC that doesn’t presume that our users are information professionals. That doesn’t presume that our users are English speakers with a college education. That doesn’t presume that our users have perfect vision and use of all their limbs. That doesn’t presume that people understand Boolean logic or authority lists or how the author field is populated. And my personal favorite…doesn’t presume that people understand the difference between a keyword and subject heading.

We need an OPAC that is designed for our users. An OPAC that is intuitive and easy-to-use, based on universal design principles and which doesn’t disregard information seeking behaviors. But if librarians don’t demand it, it ain’t gonna happen. Let’s stop letting the vendors determine what products libraries use and start demanding what we want.

Here’s some ideas:

• Include details of what we want in our system in RFPs rather than using RFPs to describe existing products.
• Conduct user testing of interfaces and publicize the results.
• Encourage librarians to become system designers.
• Write Help Documentation for users that addresses the design shortfalls of the OPAC.
• Train users whenever you can.

In the December, 2004 issue of Information Technology and Libraries, Holly Yu and Margo Young report that web searching is changing our user’s expectation of how the OPAC works. Specifically, they report that users typically type two terms in the search box, have an average of two queries per session, don’t use complex query syntax and don’t want to view more than ten documents in a result list.

The article, entitled “The Impact of Web Search Engines on Subject Searching in OPAC” suggests some changes we can make to our OPAC interfaces that our users will appreciate:

1. Menu Sequence Matters: users are much more likely to choose the first option on a dropdown menu. Make sure you put the choice they prefer in that position.

2. Users don’t understand what’s in the catalog. Get that metasearch interface rolling!

3. Users don’t know the difference between keywords and subject headings. Start users off with a keyword search. If you offer a subject heading search, make sure you specify “LC Subject Headings” and provide instruction about what that means.

4. User searches fail…a lot. If possible, devise a search interface that helps them succeed. Some ILS vendors are offering this now (Innovative’s Advanced Keyword Search feature, for example). If your vendor doesn’t have it yet, demand it. Provide spellcheck and some kind of mapping to your controlled vocabulary when possible.

There’s lots more in the article. These are just some of my personal favorites. For more info, visit Holly Yu’s website where you can view several papers she’s published on this topic.