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…)

1 person likes this post.

Unlike

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 card catalogue became the online catalogue, the online catalogue let users search for physical items within the Library.
• Journals became online journals. Libraries needed to let users find the online journals they subscribed to through various large and small publishers and hosts. They built simple in-house databases (containing journal titles and links to their homepages), or added them to the catalogue, or used a third party web based tool. As the number of e-journals grew, most ended up using the last option, a third party tool (which could offer other services, such as link resolving, and do much of the heavy lifting with managing a knowledge base).
• But users wanted one place to search. Quite understandable. If you are after a journal, why should you look in one place to see if there is a physical copy, and another place if they had access to it online. Same with books/ebooks.
• So libraries started to try and find ways to add online content to catalogue systems in bulk (which weren’t really designed for this).

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:

• Library catalogues, search systems and data – discusses the issues in putting online journal/item records on to the catalogue, and therefore why a ‘discovery systems’ can resolve these.
• Academic discovery and library catalogues – Discusses the eXtensible Catalogue, and also links to an Academics article about how they conduct research
• JISC Library Management System Review – Summarises a recent JISC report on Library Management systems
• Free e-books online via University of Pittsburgh Press – from a couple of days a go, talks about the issues of Discovery related to free academic items (books) on the web, and ensuring Library Discovery Tools include them.

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…

6 people like this post.

Unlike

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:

• The way we work with Library system (LMS) catalogues is changing, with the need to import and export large batches of records from other systems increasing, especially with online materials such as journals and e-books. This is quite a different need to those before the web, when item = physical thing in the library building, records were added one at a time, with
• Library systems have not adapted to this new need, and though technically possible is often fiddly and can feel like a hack.
• While it is possible to import batches of records, there are issues regarding keeping everything in sync. For example, Libraries often subscribe to publisher (online) ‘journal bundles’, the titles included in these bundles can change over time, but how to easily update/sync the catalogue to reflect this. One option is to regularly delete the imported records and reimport from the data source completely, though, if I understand correctly, Library Systems often do not delete records, but instead simple ’suppress’ from the public view. So doing this for twenty thousand e-journal records each month would leave 240,000 hidden records on the system each year!
• Why do we want them on the catalogue? Because users search the web interface to the catalogue to look for journals, books, theses etc. So we need to ensure our e-journals, e-books etc can be discovered via the catalogue interface.
• A Library System (LMS) will typically have a catalogue, which cataloguers and other library staff maintain, and a public web front end for users to search (and locate) items.
• However, ‘next generation’ of web search systems are now on the market, these allow the user to search the LMS catalogue and other data sources simultaneously in one modern interface.
• Setting up these systems to search other data sources (in addition to the library system catalogue) so that they include records for online journals and e-books (and more) is a much neater solution, then trying to add/sync complete cataloging records in to the library system catalogue.
• This to me (and I’m no scholar on the subject) has changed the model. The Library System catalogue was one and the same as the public web catalogue. What was on one was on the other. Librarians would discuss ’should we put X on to the catalogue?’. But now these two entities are separate. Do we want something to be discoverable on our web catalogue search system, Do we want a record on our back-end library System for something? These are two separate questions, and it is possible to have an item on one and not the other. It would be easy to say that if you just want users to be able to discover a set of items, just make them available on your next generation search systems if it wasn’t for the fact that…
• Third party systems can cross search or import records from multiple library catalogues, getting data from their library system. This was a simple thing to consider: do we want to allow these systems to have access to our records/holdings, and if so they would search our catalogue. These are examples and not the only things to consider, for example Endnote allows you to search a library catalogue within the application, of course this is the Library System catalogue.
• This creates questions: which items do we want to make available to our users searching our web catalogue? which items do we want to expose to other systems out there? What items do we want to keep in our Library system back-end catalogue for administrative/inventory  purposes? With the old simpler model these questions did not need to be asked.

I’ve drawn some rather embarrassingly bad diagrams to try and illustrate the point:

Original Library catalogue model (click on images for larger version)

New Library catalogue model

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.

Like

Unlike