Faceted Searching Solutions

The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) offered a forum series at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim.  One was sponsored by the ALCTS Catalog Form and Function Interest Group entitled “Old Records, New Records, New Interfaces.”  Three librarians, Charley Pennell, Mary Charles Lasater, and Cheryl Gowing, presented their experiences from their online catalog redesign projects.  Links to the powerpoint presentations are below:

Charley Pennell, Principal Cataloger for Metadata, North Carolina State University Libraries – Endeca Presentation

Mary Charles Lasater, Authorities Librarian, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University – Primo Presentation

Cheryl Gowing, Director, Information Management & Systems, University of Miami – Encore Presentation

[Also, here is a link to SirsiDynix's faceted searching solution: Enterprise.]

MLA’s Academic Libraries Day Report

The 2008 Michigan Library Association’s Academic Libraries Day was held on Friday, May 9 at Central Michigan University in Mt. Pleasant, MI. The theme was “Virtual Libraries/Virtual Learners: A Matter of Perspective”.  There were approximately 80 attendees.  Debbie Morrow from Grand Valley State University Libraries, ARLD Chair, did a wonderful job organizing this event.

Roy Tennant, presently the Senior Program Officer for OCLC Programs and Research, was the keynote speaker. Prior to his current position at OCLC, Tennant worked in academic libraries his entire adult life with a majority of it being at the University of California-Berkeley.

He stressed that it is important to know about our users and where to find them. According to OCLC’s 2006 report titled College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources: A Report to the OCLC Membership very few begin their search at the library’s web site. A majority begin their search using a search engine such as Google. Also this report states that the library brand identity is books. Tennant stated that this should concern us.

Tennant brought up the term “satisfice” coined by Herbert Simon. “Satisficing” means deciding what constitutes a satisfactory outcome and then looking for ways to achieve it. For any given task the user is willing to go through some pain to get results, but users have different tolerances, and our library users may have a low threshold for pain. Many view our library catalogs and systems as painful. He gave an example of the University of California-Berkley online catalog. He stated that it is a home grown system that UC Berkeley made for UC Berkeley librarians, not for students or faculty. And its search terminology did look painful! He added that librarians need to remember that not everyone likes the search as most of us do; users like the find, not the search.

The integrated library system is still needed but a new kind of finding tool on the user-end for searching must occur, Tennant said. He referred to next generation library search engines such as Primo from Ex Libris and Encore from Innovative Interfaces, Inc. (III). Open source systems Tennant mentioned were VUFind from Villanova University and Koha from LibLime.

WorldCat Local from OCLC offers a customized view of WorldCat.org which is the OCLC database open to the public. Presently WorldCat has over 1.25 billion holdings. WorldCat Local puts local items first which differs from the ranking of WorldCat.org. The ranking in WorldCat.org is based on the number of libraries that own the item—the more that own the item the higher the ranking. All of these systems use faceted browsing.

He asserted that searching will happen anywhere such as from cell phones and it will be more disaggregated. The library needs to be where the user is; we need to build a search around them, not around us. And the user is on virtual spaces such as Facebook, Flickr, Meebo, etc.

Our goal needs to be to get users to what they need as quickly and painlessly as possible.  Tennant states that open url resolvers are a good start, but we need to do more. The Getting Users to Full-Text (GUF) Project at the University of Rochester is like a “link resolver on steroids” according to Tennant. This is a move in a positive direction for our users, he believes.

One of the best points Tennant made was showing the audience a picture of very intricate plumbing. Most of us do not care about plumbing unless it doesn’t work and then we call a plumber. He equated it with our catalogs. Our users do not need to see the guts, they just want the catalog to work.

He acknowledged the following barriers: lack of resources, lots of bad data, lack of appropriate vendor solutions, institutional inertia, and staff skill, with the latter being solved by retooling our staff. He viewed our opportunities as follows: working collaboratively, reallocating resources, creating agile institutions, using the library as a user would, and being in physical as well as virtual spaces.

After Tennant’s keynote, there were morning and afternoon breakout sessions. The titles follow:

• Research Help Now: Virtual Reference Service with a Multi-Library Arrangement
• Embedded: Librarians in the Online Trenches
• E-Books: Issues, Perspectives and the Future
• Navigating the Stream with a Paddle: Video Streaming Applications and Management

I attended two of them and found both very informative. Dr. Richard Cochran, Dean of the Library at Ferris State University, was excellent at facilitating the discussion and wrap-up of the day. The last presentation was from Russ Knopp of Traverse Management Resources. He spoke about the MLA restructuring, transitional leadership, and communities of practice.

This was the first Academic Libraries Day I have attended, and I found it enlightening. The Park Library at Central Michigan University is spectacular!

(Report by Cathy Wolford)

MLA Annual Conference Report by Cathy Wolford

The Michigan Library Association’s annual conference was November 7 through November 9, 2007.  One of the programs I attended was titled “Catalog 2.0.”  It was very informative and relevant to DALNET.  The presenters were Jackie Wrosch from Eastern Michigan University (formerly of DALNET); Krista Graham, Electronic Resources Coordinator/Reference Librarian at Central Michigan University; Dao Rong Gong, Catalog Librarian at Michigan State University, and Juliane Morian, Head of Electronic Services at Clinton-Macomb Public Library.

Jackie explained various ways that Eastern Michigan University (EMU) tries to make their OPAC more user-friendly and dynamic.  One way is to embed java script into the HTML templates that come with their OPAC. Also, an open source alternative she is investigating is from Villanova University and called VUFind. It was released this past July in beta. The library at Villanova University uses Voyager for its ILS as does EMU. VUFind has faceted searching which is becoming very popular. If you are interested in looking at some library catalogs with faceted searching try these:

North Carolina State University

Queens Library

Miami University (Ohio)

Peninsula Library System

Plymouth State University

Michigan State University (MSU) was one of the initial 13 libraries that entered a partnership initiative with Innovative Interfaces to help develop Encore, Innovative’s answer to Library 2.0. Recently Encore beta went live in Michigan State’s opac. In this MLA program, Dao Rong Gong from Michigan State University explained the development and features of Encore. Through a survey link on the Encore search page, MSU is hoping to get feedback about what users think about their searching experience with this new product. For a recent press release from Innovative concerning the launch of Encore please see this link.

Clinton-Macomb Public Library did usability tests of their library web site last August. Juliane Morian explained that their users wanted “keyword” searching taken off of the quick search and added to the advanced search. Users also requested that the font size be increased. She showed us their old home page and catalog and compared it to their new home page and catalog. The visual differences were dramatically better in their new version. She mentioned that they used contrasting colors to make items “pop.” She also configured the MeLCat search in their catalog to imitate the look and feel of the Clinton-Macomb’s library catalog. She described it as a “virtual MeLCat branch.”

Krista Graham from Central Michigan University (CMU) had two focus groups help their library determine what patrons would prefer in the library catalog. The librarians had some pre-selected catalogs to show the groups and asked what they liked and did not like about them. The consensus was that they did like spell check. The users also wanted advanced searching on the first page of the library catalog. Both Krista and Juliane agreed that when asking library users what they want in the catalog, the answers may be surprising.

There were several very interesting and informative programs at this year’s MLA conference. Next year the conference will be held at the Radisson in Kalamazoo, Michigan during October 22 through October 24, 2008.