Tom Roper's Weblog

Librarians in the Guardian

It's Online next week, so the Guardian Work Supplement has a feature, career focus: Information Professionals. It looks as if they couldn't be bothered to put it on the web site though, which is strange.

Update, Monday 1340: Richard Nelsson of the Guardian comments below that it is now up, at http://money.guardian.co.uk/workweekly/story/0,,1958192,00.html

Technorati Tags: cilip, onlineinformation2006

Googling for a diagnosis

A recent BMJ article, Googling for a diagnosis, and its press coverage, ruffled some feathers on lis-medical. But Phil Bradley correctly asks why most health librarians have been so reticent on the matter in public.

Googling for a diagnosis--use of Google as a diagnostic aid: internet based study
Hangwi Tang, Jennifer Hwee Kwoon Ng
BMJ 2006:390036405, doi:10.1136/bmj.39003.640567.AE

Technorati Tags: google

Government to dilute freedom of information

Following neatly Tony Benn's address at CILIP members day, see this from Information World Review:
Government set to dilute freedom of information

Technorati Tags: freedomofinformation

Brown(e) Issue

Lorcan Dempsey laments his failure to find anything in Wikipedia on the Brown [sic] issue system; you remember, the one where one had cardboard pocket-like tickets, as many as one's borrowing entitlement, which were handed over to the library staff to borrow a book. They would take a card from inside the book, put it in the pocket, and file it as a record of the loan. The trouble is Lorcan spells it Brown, whereas it is attributed to Nina E. Browne (note the final e).
This is what Harrod's Librarians Glossary has to say on the matter:
"Browne Book Charging Systems. A system of book charging which is attributed to Nina E. Browne, an American librarian, who described it in 1895. It is, however, very little different from the method adopted by Mr. L.G.Virgo, Librarian of Bradford Public Library. The reader has a limited number of tickets, each of which is available for one book only at a time, and which he gives up when books are borrowed and which are handed back when the books are returned. This simple, reliable and speedy method was replaced in America by the Newark and Detroit methods and others based on them, but, until photo-charging was introduced [oh how my heart flutters, photo-charging! the method used in the first library I ever worked in, Child's Hill, in the London Borough of Barnet, under Mrs Howes and Frank Brudenell in 1978-TR] was the most universally used method in Great Britain. 'Reverse Browne' uses a pocket book-card and a card ticket: this was described by Jacob Schwartz in 1897 and has been in use for a number of years. Since World War Two other methods have taken the place of Browne, but two modifications of this system have enabled it to meet the demands of busier public libraries; these are the Cheque Book Charging Method and the Islington Charging System....[the entry goes on to describe the notorious Gravesend modification-TR]"
Harrod, Leonard Montague
The librarian's glossary of terms used in librarianship and the book crafts 3rd ed
London: André Deutsch, 1971
The interesting thing about Browne is that it left little information behind about a reader's or an item's habits or history. Also it was awfully slow and error-prone, for the consequences of a clumsy assistant or reader knocking a tray of cards onto the floor were catastrophic.

Technorati Tags: browneissue, lorcandempsey, childshill, photocharging

Media librarians

Following neatly some of the things Gertrud Erbach had to say at UCL last week, today's Guardian carries a piece by Richard Nelsson on the future for media librarians to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Association of UK Media Librarians (AUKML). Personal trivia: I was a AUKML member in the early 90s, during a brief period as a picture librarian and researcher.
There are some annoying registration hoops to jump through before the Guardian will reveal the full text.

Technorati Tags: medialibrarians, AUKML

English Short Title Catalogue

Hooray. The English Short Title Catalogue, which covers pre-1800 holdings from the BL and a number of other libraries, is online and free at http://estc.bl.uk/.
I ran a search for Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. Here are some screen shots (click on the thumbnails to enlarge them):

Technorati Tags: englishshorttitlecatalogue

Collection development in a new medical school: talk at UCL

With Gertrud Erbach, Senior Editorial Services Manager at News International and Sally McMahon, Head of Libraries and Information Services for Brighton and Hove, I spoke to masters students at the UCL School of Library Archive and Information Studies.
As promised, here are copies of my presentation and the BSMS collection development statement.
Download ucloct06.pdf (>9MB)
Download cdg46_collectiondevelopmentstatement_bsms.doc Gertrud gave a fascinating account of collection management at a major news organisation, covering information services, picture services, archives and group records. She noted a fall in enquires from sub-editors, who now have desktop services and the Internet for fact-checking. Their editorial databases contains full text from twenty five newspapers, all except the FT, which she expects to include soon. They spend a great deal of time adding metadata to articles. She discussed some of the intellectual property issues (high profile writers apparently retain their copyright) and how they handle corrections and legal problems such as articles which are the subject of writs, as well as picture indexing. The NI systems sounds very well-staffed: the Mail has apparently closed its library, while the Guardian survives with a staff of only eight. I was interested in the impact the free papers are having on the traditional titles. Every London street is now clogged with distributors for the different free-sheets.

Sally spoke on collection management: some views from Brighton and Hove. Stock selection and supply were included in the Private Finance Initiative deal for the new Jubilee library in Brighton. She discussed some of the implications of the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, Better stock, better libraries, about which she was optimistic (see my view of it here). PricewaterhouseCoopers found that while UK public libraries spent £85 million on stock, they spent a further £35 million on the process of buying that material and came up with a series of proposals to reduce that overhead, including clusters of libraries, an e-marketplace and a national catalogue. She wondered if PricewaterhouseCoopers might not have over-estimated the possible savings, ignoring the local costs of moving to a new system and questioned how the balance between local control and a national system might be struck.
She reported that a group of six library authorities in the South-East had come together for joint procurement of a library management system, which would offer readers a single card they could use in all participating libraries. She mentioned Coldharbour community libraries in Kent, who as part of the love libraries initiative had removed all spine labels, which provoked several questions.
She described how Brighton and Hove stock supply was made part of the PFI deal, which she thought was probably unique. Both bibliographic services and stock procurement were outsourced. The advantage was that it allowed them to get the largest possible PFI grant, as well as meaning the materials fund is invulnerable to councillors of the future intent on cuts.. The building is owned by the developers for twenty-five years, after which it reverts to public ownership. They are now considering relinquishing selection to the contractors, using evidence-based stock selection (I'm not sure quite what this might mean).
She discussed their RFID system: 70% of all transactions are now done by RFID, and they can use wands for stocktaking. They will not be able to improve on the 70% figure until they can take payment electronically, and there are problems with coding some of the audio-visual stock. She looked forward to licensed downloads, which would replace physical collections of audio-visual material.
She discussed the Public Library Service Standards, which she found were not always very forgiving of authorities with rapidly growing populations. She also discussed how library users and councillors find stock management difficult to understand, particularly withdrawals of items. There seems to be no correlation between stock levels and public satisfaction. New standards will be released for consultation in March 2007, to be implemented in 2008.
She mentioned the Strong and Prosperous Communities white paper [has anyone noticed that whoever registered the Department of Communities and Local Government domain, couldn't spell: comunities.gov.uk?] which will change the way local authorities manage performance, with a greater emphasis on customer satisfaction. She wondered how greater local control could be balanced with the Public Libraries and Museums Act duty to run a “comprehensive and efficient” public library service and felt there was danger that vocal minorities might hijack services

Internet Librarian International: final keynote: Creating Communities, Interacting with Users

The final keynote was given by Jenny Levine and Michael Stephens.
Jenny observed that a word she had heard a great deal at the conference was community. But if you make a social tool available, you don't automatically have community.
How will you measure success? Possible metrics might include numbers of comments, subscribers, wiki contributors, IM questions, downloads, but there are more complex ways to measure participation.
She highlighted a number of library successes, for example
Ann Arbor District Library, whose whole library website is a blog
College of DuPage, IL: who had the story of how the library changed a student from Burma's life
Superpatron: a library user who developed an RSS feed of books he has on reserve
Princeton public library who developed a booklovers' wiki
Arizona State University whose technology plan is a wiki (but I think internal only)
Earl Gregg Swem Library at the College of William and Mary who use meebo me: see http://swem.wm.edu/resources/subject-guides/american-studies.cfm but why the "Swem Library does not endorse Meebo" disclaimer?
Thomas Ford Memorial Library who offer story time as podcasts
Georgia Perimeter College Decatur Campus Library who offer podcasts of what's new in the library
Bloomington PL who offer gaming
Crazy hats day at Homer Township Public Library in Flickr.
Lansing Public Library Celebrity Read: Flickr photoset
Jenny made the point that all these were free to create apart from the staff time involved, that there were now low barriers to experiment and adoption and decreased learning curves.
At the end she showed us an example of La Grange public library using Suprglu.com to create a combined picture of resources (but I can't find it)

Finally Michael Stephens spoke and here I 'm afraid my notes fail me, as he spoke with tremendous energy, and threw numbered lists at us relentlessly. He started with a cover of Newsweek who ran a story on Web 2.0 earlier this year and mentioned once more the
one day in history initiative.
How does one get get buy-in to new services? How does they best serve the library? He suggested we should read the OCLC survey of perceptions of library and information services. He cited a user of Lawrence Library in Kansas who claimed that libraries were inefficient, limited and obsolete. He suggested we should "expand the library brand", citing Starbucks who are now selling books [their books are as bad as their coffee, I should imagine-TR].
He suggested five things to consider when implementing a change: does it erect a barrier? Is it library or user-centred? Does it add more rules? Does it make more work for users? is it a damage control exercise?
He gave some frightening examples of unfriendly notices banning mobiles and games consoles.
We should go where users are; as Karen Schneider put it, "the user is not broken" Libraries need to be in myspace and YouTube
We should adopt a 2.0 philosophy, and create librarian 2.0, Collaborative services and trust: build culture of trust
He then gave five phrases to beware of: "we've always done it this way", "he or she is a roadblock", "IT won't let us", "there's no time" and "the director doesn't like technology". We must plan, dream and innovate and keep the library learning.
Plymouth State Uni Lamson library: OPAC as blog
It is now up to us, and the new wave of library school graduates will be important [his confidence in this was interesting, And I'm not sure one can be quite so sanguine about the situation i the UK; I wonder if in the US they do not have the difficulties in attracting bright young people into the profession that we have here. He referred us to the Squidoo library lens.
And here my notes run out; sorry, Michael, if I've traduced or truncated too much.

Technorati Tags: ILI2006, internetlibrarianinternational, library 2.0

Internet Librarian International: Internet Research Intricacies: Out-Googling Google: Finding what Google Misses

UKEIG and CILIP's very own Karen Blakeman, introduced by Marydee Ojala, spoke on alternatives to Google, though she offered some helpful advice on using the Beast of Mountain View, to wit to make sure that one uses the right section of Google, and to use advanced search options. Her slides can be seen here.
In her experience, that of UKEIG members and of many other searchers, Google results vary, and are frequently not reproducible: the Boolean OR operator doesn't work properly, the hits numbers seem to be fictional, the similar/related pages feature is very limited, synonym search with a tilde is unreliable and inconsistent and the link command is also flaky.
Other engines can offer different coverage, different search features, and use different algorithms for ranking.
Thumbshots.com allows one to compare search engine results and ranking, thus:
GOOGLE : tom roper
Overlapping Links: 20(20%)
Unique Links: 78
Total Links: 98

YAHOO : tom roper
Overlapping Links: 20(20%)
Unique Links: 80
Total Links: 100

Live, formerly MSN, is much more consumer oriented. It seems to be more up to date than Google, and offers link and linkdomain commands. New search features are often introduced but not always announced. It includes an RSS feeds search.
Yahoo web search, better accessed through uk.search.yahoo.com which bypasses that annoying quasi-portal of Yahoo's, is comparable with Google, indeed sometimes better. Boolean operators are supported, one can do some nesting, it seems to index more pdfs and other files than Google, and it has good link and linkdomain commands.
Alltheweb.com's live search is used by Yahoo as a test bed.
Exalead I think was Karen's favourite. It supports wild cards, internal masking, has a NEAR command, and an approximate spelling and phonetic search feature
Ask allows the searcher to refine by narrowing or expanding, though is not always consistent
Windows Live Academic search she considered better than Google Scholar, which misses for example all of Reed Elsevier's output. Live Academic allows one to format results to import into personal bibliographic software packages..
Should we use Google at all, she asked. It is sometimes better to go straight to other sources for news, company information or statistics.
For subject searches she recommended Intute (the UK Resource Discovery Network as was) which is now much easier to use and for business information alacrawiki.com. There are also general reference sources such as Wikipeida, and the old-fashioned structured databases.
For news she suggested Google News, but also Accoona, for blogs and RSS feeds Blogpulse, for audio and video Blinkx and for advertising in moving image formats Visit4info. For still images Flickr, morguefile.com and commons.wikipedia.com were all useful.

For cross-searching, clusty.com does clustering and an Italian cross-searching tool, trovando.it has some useful features.
She concluded with the searchers'' top tips:

•It's not your fault if Google doesn't work
• In Google use advanced search and be sure you're in the most appropriate section
• Experiment with cross search
• If there's odd results, go to the advanced search feature

Technorati Tags: ILI2006, internetlibrarianinternational, search

Internet Librarian International: Internet Research Intricacies: What's New with Search

Stephen Arnold gave a fascinating presentation, showing some new interfaces for search engines. He described three stages of the evolution of search, the brute force era of 1976-1998, the social+analytics era from 1998-2006, above all the period of Google and measuring inbound clicks, and the future, to 2010, of compound processes, that is to say putting queries in context, using algorithms, knowledge-bases and intelligence He suggested that products like Autonomy which use neural networking will be important . Voice and video (conversations etc) are the richest area of information and are currently not indexed or organised at all.
He expected there to be much more non-objective searching, as people try to "steer" hits. There will be a big period of wheel-reinvention as the new search tools discover the limitations that Dialog and others found in 1980. He mentioned promiscuous searching systems as holding some nasty surprises, but I'm a bit vague as to what a promiscuous searching system might be.
New things for 2006: tag, comment. Microsoft and Yahoo have both "bet the farm" on social software. Words are no longer enough: images, data. Faceted search is becoming more common. Metrics: data analysis and maths will become more important, and librarians need to be able to understand them.
Complexity increases, concurrently with development of Google. Computational cost also increasing (bandwidth, memory disk space, computational time) but precision/recall are increasing much more slowly.
Amazon had to discontinue personalised search as their technology costs go up like a rocket. Search is expensive, so the first to be sacrificed. Yahoo's costs are also out of control.
Then he showed us a series of search services:
Podzinger: indexes spoken podcasts in English, funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, one imagines for surveillance purposes.
Exalead: offers a baby view of screen, and related terms
Mondosoft, who developed a search engine for the Vatican site hard wired to the Catholic catechism.
There's http://rwsm.directtaps.net/ a faceted search tool developed by Microsoft,
He also showed us a new interface to Google, which allowed one to refine searches, which I can't now find, and Windows Live and Alltheweb
His conclusions were that the new search comes with enormous costs, that technology is driving search again, that new systems are considerably more complex, that multiprocessor chips are coming and have many implications for search, that there is huge confusion, hubris and fear uncertainty and doubt in search sales.
When one company controls 65% of search traffic, there is a burning need for objectivity. He called on professional associations (he said the SLA, but it is equally valid for CILIP) to get involved with these issues.

Technorati Tags: ILI2006, internetlibrarianinternational, search