What interests you?
- Mystery Solved
Published on March 3rd, 2010 - Library search/discovery apps : intro
Published on May 27th, 2009 - Library catalogues, search systems and data
Published on February 12th, 2009
Posts in full....
What interests you?
Posts in full....
We recently (well, last summer) launched Aquabrowser as our main library catalogue. We provided a feedback link for people to comment on the new interface, as we were keen to pick up on functionality it lacked or issues we may not have thought off. You can see the feedback link on the green bar on the right, it asks the user to login, and then provides a feedback form to leave a message. (more…)
There’s a lot of talk in the Library world about ‘next generation catalogues’, library search tools and ‘discovery’. There’s good reason for this talk, in this domain the world has been turned on its head.
History in a nutshell:
The online catalogues (OPAC) were simple web interfaces supplied with the much larger Library management system (ILS or LMS) which ran the backend the public never saw. These were nearly always slow, ugly, unloved and not very useful.
A couple of years a go(ish), we saw the birth of the next generation catalogue, or search and discovery tools. I could list them, but the Disruptive Technology Library Jester does an excellent job here. I strongly suggest you take a look.
Personally, I think I first heard about Aquabrowser. At the time a new OPAC which was miles ahead of those supplied with Library systems and was (I think) unique as a web catalogue interface not associated with a particular system, and shock, not from an established Library Company. The second system I heard about was probably Primo from Ex Libris. At first not understanding what it was: It sounds like Metalib (another product from the same company which cross-searches various e-resource), is Primo replacing it? Or replacing the OPAC? It took a while to appreciate that this was something that sat on top of the rest. From then, VuFind, LibraryFind and more.
While some where traditional commercial products (Primo, Encore, Aquabrowser), many more were open source solutions, a number of which developed at American Libraries. Often built on common (and modern) technology stacks such as Apache solr/Lucene, Drupal, php/java, mysql/postgres etc.
In the last year or so a number of major Libraries have started to use one of these ‘Discovery Systems’ for example: the BL and Oxford using Primo, National Libraries of Scotland & Wales and Harvard have purchased Aquabrowser and the LSE is trying VuFind. At Sussex (where I work) we have purchased and implemented Aquabrowser. We’ve added data enrichments such as table of contents (searchable and visible on records), book covers and the ability to tag and review items (tag/reviewing has been removed for various reasons) .
It would be a mistake to put all of these in to one basket. Some focus on being a OPAC replacement, others on being a unified search tool, searching both local and online items. Some focus on social tools, tagging & reviewing. Some work out the box others are just a set of components which a Library can sow together, and some are ‘SaaS’.
It’s an area that is fast changing. Just recently an established Library web app Company announced a forthcoming product called ‘Summon’, which takes searching a library’s online content a step further.
So what do libraries go for, it’s not just potentially backing the wrong horse, but backing the wrong horse when everyone one else had moved on to dog racing!
And within all this it is important to remember ‘what do users actually want’. From the conversations and articles I’ve read, they want a Google search box, but one which returns results from trusted sources and academic content. Whether they are looking for a specific book, specific journal, a reference/citation, or one/many keywords. And not just one which searches the metadata, but one which brings back results based on the full text of items as well. There are some that worry that too many results are confusing. As Google proves, an intelligent ranking system makes the number of results irrelevant.
Setting up (and even reviewing) most of these systems take time, and if users start to add data (tags, reviews) to one system, then changing could cause problems (so should we be using third party tag/rating/review systems?).
You may be interested in some other articles I’ve written around this:
There’s a lot talk about discovery tools, but what sort to go for, who to back? And many issues have yet to be resolved. I’m come on to those next…
Below is an email I sent to UK Library e-resources mailing list (lis-e-resources@jiscmail.ac.uk). I’m putting it here for the same reason then I sent the original email: I think there are questions relating to the changing role of the library catalogue and new models are developing in how and where metadata exists for the items libraries provide access to.
My points in a nutshell:
I’ve drawn some rather embarrassingly bad diagrams to try and illustrate the point:
So after that rather lengthy nutshell (sorry) here is the original email, which does ramble and lack a point in parts, sorry:
Over the last few years the need to add e-resources (journals/books) to our library catalogue has grown. The primarily reason being users expect (understandably) to find books and journals in the catalogue, and that includes online copies.
This has seen the way we use our catalogue change, from primarily adding individual records as we purchase items, to trying to add records in bulk from various third party systems.
These third party systems include the link resolver (for journal records), e-book suppliers and (experimentally) repository software (for theses).
I imagine many are in the same boat as us, we want to do this in a scalable way, we don’t want to be editing individual records by hand when we could be looking at a very large number of records both for journals and – as/if usage takes off – e-book.
For this to work, it requires high quality (MARC) records from suppliers, and LMS (ILS) vendors adapting their systems for this change in behaviour. For example, it may have been reasonable in the past for an LMS supplier to presume that large numbers of records would not need to be regularly suppressed/dropped, though with ever changing journal bundles this may be normal practice in the future.
Furthermore, just to add confusion, next generation web catalogues can search multiple sources. The assumption that ‘public web catalogue’ reflects the ‘LMS catalogue’ (i.e. what is in one is in the other) may no longer apply. Should e-content be kept out of the LMS but made seamlessly available to users using new web interfaces (Primo, Aquabrowser, etc etc)?
This seems like quite a big area, and a change in direction, with questions, and yet I haven’t seen much amounts of discussion (Of course, this may well be due to a bad choice of mailing lists/blogs/articles).
Are others grappling with this sort of thing?
Anyone else wishing they could import their entire online journal collection with a few clicks but find dodgy records (which we may for!) and fussy library systems turn it in to a very slow process?
And not quite sure how to keep them all in sync?
Would love to hear from you.
Who else has all their e-journals on the catalogue? Was it quick? Do you exclude free journals etc?
I also added this in a follow up email:
We already have Aquabrowser and this does seem to offer a nice solution to some of this. It looks like you just need to drop a MARC file in place and the records will be included. (See http://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/)
But this presumes the ‘keep the records out of the LMS’ is the right approach, and it is not for all.
Our (LMS) catalogue is exposed else where, such as the M25 search, Suncat. And others will add COPAC and Worldcat to the list. Plus other local union-ish services.
By simply adding these records to a next gen catalogue system they will not be available to these types of systems. This may be desirable (Does someone searching Suncat want to know that your users have online access to a journal) but the opposite may also be true.
Lets take a thesis, born digital in a repository. It would seem desirable to add the thesis to main LMS catalogue (especially as printed/bound thesis would appear there), and make it available to third party union/cross-search systems.
Next gen catalogues are – I think – certainly part of the solution, but only when you just want to make the records available via your local web interface.
Owen Stephens has replied with some excellent points and thoughts on the matter which are worth reading.
Finally, I’m not a Librarian, cataloguer, or expert, so these are just my thoughts. There is stuff to think about in this area, I’m not suggestion I have the answers or even have articulated what I think the issues are with any success.
Update: Just come across a blog post from Lorcan Dempsey, which as ever articulates some of this very well.