PLA Blog

A humorous, documentary-style look at the ALA Midwinter Conference in Seattle by Nick Baker. Hit the play button to view (it’s 4min 58sec long, and totally safe for work).

The evening of Saturday, January 20 was a typical party-hopping affair. First I hit the NMRT social at the Elephant and Castle in the Red Lion Hotel, organized by one of our own conference bloggers Heidi Dolamore, and somehow found myself in the company of many, many ALA Councilors amidst the new members, some of whom happen to be old friends, some became new friends.

Since many of us were also bloggers, we headed off to the OCLC Blogger Salon at the Sheraton, which was a bit tight and warm, but offered lovely snacks and time with old friends. I wasn’t there long (definitely long enough to end up in, and “at fault for,” an interesting photo with an extra long tag dedicated to me :D), before I was off to the ALA New Councilor’s Reception in one of the fancy, large rooms.

There amidst the lovely deserts and ever plenitudinous Starbucks and Tazo bevies, I mingled with new and experienced councilors alike, and met Joseph Eagan, who works for the Montgomery County Public Libraries, and also serves as Chair of the Council Orientation Committee and the Maryland Chapter Councilor. Ever the intrepid social butterfly with a digital voice recorder and headphones at the ready, I was able to conduct a quick interview about what it takes to orient new councilors, how aspiring councilors can get involved, the focus of upcoming work, and his excitement about new, young councilors being added to the mix.

Thank you, Joe, for taking the time to speak with me!

And to hear more about the ALA experience first-hand from a new council member, check out Heidi’s post.

 

 PLA Blog: Impromptu Interview with Joseph Eagan [10:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (699)

I had the opportunity to run this idea by about 10 PLA committees on Sunday, January 21 at ALA Midwinter in Seattle, and everyone had really, really positive feedback, including volunteers to contribute people power and content, and ideas on related programs at the upcoming PLA conference in Minneapolis. You may have also seen a snippet about this in the January/February issue of Public Libraries magazine.

So, the public library association is contemplating putting together a wiki. Now, in an age where wikis are sprouting up like weeds, we’re looking to create something unique, useful, and inviting to public librarians, while striving to avoid too much redundancy and overlap with, but also driving traffic and activity to, other library/librarianship wikis.

The current, nascent concept entails building an living, breathing encyclopedia of public librarianship (not a wiki of or about the Public Library Association, but a wiki sponsored by the Public Library Association). The plan is to create a base information organization structure, with categories that can speak to patrons, friends of the library, trustees, selectmen, librarians in other types of libraries, library school students, potential librarians, and Joe and Jane Patron, and to populate that base category structure with seed content from many different corners of PLA.

The next step is setting the wiki free to the internet wild where public librarians can grow and prune the wiki as necessary with more current content contribution. Links to other blogs, wikis, and articles can serve as bibliographic references, further reading, and examples, while keeping the content of the wiki encyclopedic and balanced in nature. The Public Library Association, as the sponsoring organization, would be in charge of creating guidelines, style guides, and just overall general management and monitoring. You, as the public, will help keep the wiki living and growing.

So our questions to you are:

• As a public librarian, a graduate student, a patron, an administrator, a friend of the library, or even just an onlooker, seeking information specifically about public libraries and librarians, what would you be looking for in an encyclopedia/almanac/pathfinder/ of public librarianship?
• What kind of information about public libraries and librarianship would you seek that you can’t readily get your hands on right now?
• What about Wikipedia, which is powered by the MediaWiki software, do you like or dislike? Is it easy or hard to use? What do you think would be better?
• What about Wikipedia, as an editable encyclopedia where you can search, navigate, and edit content, do you like or dislike? We’re looking for comments on the layout and usability, and not a discussion of judgments about Wikipedia itself.

Please post your answers to these questions, and any comments you may have about the proposed project, as comments to this post, so that they can be incorporated into the development of the project.

In the meantime, have a look at the other wikis librarians should know about:

• Wikipedia
  While Wikipedia does give some librarians the heebie jeebies, the peoples’ encyclopedia can be used as a helpful resource of information (especially current events), and a good starting place for research. Librarians can easily get involved with creating and editing articles on Wikipedia by creating an account.
  
• Library Success Wiki
  Have a best practice you want to share? Looking for best practices in libraries? Check out this wiki. Just create an account, and you can add to or edit any section you like. This was a big favorite with the PLA committees I talked to.
• Library 2.0 Wiki
  A very beta wiki (the home page is very blank) about the Library 2.0 concept. The best place to start is the Links page, but there isn’t much other content on the wiki overall. Librarians can help build it out by creating an account and adding content. I’m hoping that the creators of the wiki will add more content and perhaps flesh out the current pages to tell librarians what they can do to help.
  
• Oregon Library Instruction Wiki
  “A collaboratively developed resource for librarians involved with or interested in instruction. All librarians and others interested in library instruction are welcome and encouraged to contribute.” An *excellent* source of instructional content for all types of libraries, with a nicely laid out home page to help librarians learn how to be involved.
  
• Blogging Libraries Wiki
  A collection of links to libraries with blogs, categorized by type of library. If your library has a blog, create an account to list it there. Or, if you want to see what libraries are doing with blogs, this is a good site to visit.
  
• Library and Information Science Wiki
  Also very beta, this wiki of library science presents a good start for organizational structure.

Hi everybody, I’m Heidi. Now that I’m back home in San Francisco, I finally have time to post about Seattle!

My term as an at large member of Council began last summer, but so far that’s just meant that I got subscribed to the Council email list. The Council sessions at Midwinter were my first in-person meetings, and I even went up to the microphone once or twice to speak my mind. I was surprised and delighted by the number of Councilors who stopped by my seat in the back row to welcome me to Council and thank me for speaking up. Personally, I find Council FASCINATING and had a whole lot of fun. I felt very much like a sponge trying to drink in as much information as possible, but something tells me that Council will always throw a lot of information my way and that feeling might not go away.

During the Council session on Sunday we had an informal ‘hot topic’ discussion called “Creating a Buzz about Council.” As the governing body of our association, it is important that Councilors represent and reflect the entire membership. As it stands, school librarians and western states as well as students, front-line (non-administrator level) staff, and recent graduates are especially underrepresented. We did a bit of brainstorming to figure out why.

Some of the obstacles we identified:

• big time commitment/can’t get time off for conferences
• expensive
• don’t know what Council is or why it is important
• Council is too politicized/boring/inefficient
• need name recognition to get elected

We discussed a number of potential solutions, including financial assistance for elected Councilors and increased mentoring efforts. I’d love to hear more from all of you about your perception of Council. If you’ve ever considered running for Council or are curious and want to hear more, drop me a line and I’ll do everything I can to bully you into running provide the support and encouragement you need to get involved.

I’m a little slow with posting about the Sunday meeting of PLA committees, but it takes awhile to get used to the three-hour time difference/jet lag.

I’m on the PLA Services to Preschool Children and Their Caregivers Committee, and we met Sunday to discuss our plans for upcoming conferences and the like. We will be having an excellent program at ALA Annual in Washington, D.C. titled “Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales: Every BOY Ready to Read @ your Library”.

Dr. Leonard Sax, author of Why Gender Matters, will be presenting the latest research on the male brain, how this research may change the way librarians do story times for boys and how this research can be communicated to parents and caregivers. Dr. Sax will present and there will be a question/answer forum.

As any children’s librarian out there can tell you - there is definitely a difference in the behavior of little boys and girls during storytime! This looks to be an great program and I hope y’all can make it!

In my previous life I worked for a vendor in various positions and did not have many opportunities to attend the lectures and programs held in the early evening. I took advantage of my new position at the conference to attend the Arthur Curly Memorial Lecture by Joe Klein, Time Magazine and began to think about how his lecture relates to public libraries.

Joe Klein, columnist for Time Magazine gave an arousing lecture on the Iraq War Saturday evening. He laid out the reasons the Bush administration began the war and why it is unwinnable. His analysis was clear and enlightened. He answered audience questions until 6:00 p.m., answering questions about the upcoming presidential campaign, Iran and Palestine. One audience member made an important point about misinformation. She received an e-mail about the alleged background of Barak Obama. The e-mail accused Obama of being related to Osama Bin Laden and a member of extremist Islamic groups.

Klein underlined the importance of libraries periodically during his talk and after this comment. He called libraries “Curators of Citizenship.” He wants libraries to create displays and programs about Islam and the Arab World. While many libraries are doing this, his talk seemed to bring a sense of urgency and increased effort. Campaigning for the 2008 presidential election is already beginning. The importance of picking a new President to deal with the Iraq war and work in the delicate regions of the world makes the library’s place as educator even more important. Truthful information about the world needs to be available to everyone equally. And, of course, this is where the public library comes in. If it has been a while since your library provided programming on Iraq, Islam, or the Arab World maybe it is time to get creative! Encouraging curiosity about the world is what libraries do best. And, for those of you with great programming ideas please share them here or in another forum.

I left Seattle at 1:17pm PST this afternoon, and I’m currently waiting out my layover listening to the State of the Union address on my laptop via stream from the NPR web site, while I check email and work on a few more posts.

Speaking of posts, you will likely see a few more posts over the next week as our conference bloggers continue to share their conference experiences as they make their ways home and  the madness of the meetings has died down.  So keep an eye here!

Also, we encourage your comments on our conference posts, as well as your feedback on our conference coverage as the final posts are posted.  What did you like best, or least?  Is there content or are there sessions that we should cover more or less?

We’re also planning on covering more conferences outside of ALA, presented by other library associations, and even in other industries, because there is so much we can learn and so much transferable knowledge out there.  We’ll keep you posted on those developments!

I should’ve learned from my own experience mommy-(and my-cat-fluffy-) blogging: Never promise a follow-up post “tomorrow.” Sure, you’ve got about one day’s wiggle-room thanks to the International Date Line, but that’s rarely enough time for anyone with a life (or, actually, small children. There are plenty of lives that make “forgetting to blog” a lot less easy)

By-the-bye: For various reasons (the non-vendor-mentioning policy, having mislaid my uplink-cord-thingy) I’m not putting the pictures I took at the booth up here. I will upload them to my photo-share site, Flickr, but probably not until closer to the end of the month. Until then enjoy the baby/toddler pictures)

The second half of my stint at the booth was pretty much more of the same, though I did indulge myself in a bit of paradigm-breaking. Or, to put it less kindly, popping out of the booth space with a relentless cheerful “Hi, there!” But only twice. After all, if the conference attendee has gone to the trouble of making glancing-but-non-committal eye-contact (there’s a real art to combining pleasant sociability with a clear decision to Have Nothing to Do With That Booth Rep, mkay? Thx!)–? Hardly sporting.

Later, Julie of Yakima, WA asked about how the Washington (State) Summer Reading Blog went, and I offered to run-and-find-out (later, of course, see Saturday’s post about having my arterial blood internet connection removed) and about blogging in general. Answer: Pretty darn well actually. I read some nice SF and F reviews (my speciality-interest) from a teen rejoicing in the screen handle: Proginoskes unXed. Kids like that just warm the cockles of my heart.

Julie’d had a requirement to maintain a blog for library school and, as with most social-experiences-made-into-class-requirements, hadn’t found it that compelling. After all, since she didn’t really have anything she wanted or needed to say, what’s the point–? Not her cuppa. (Hah! Little does she know how many bloggers out there have noooooo problem with that one. Hey. Quit looking at me like that–!) On the other hand, the Stevens County Rural Library maintained a book review blog that she enjoyed stopping by regularly: their Virtual Book Club. She found this to be a terrific option for library staff and patrons (I agree) who come up against short hours, constrained budgets and long (and sometimes impassable) country roads…

We talked about possibilities for blogging the Washington State Library Association’s Annual Conference (pretty good) and a bit of local politics (Here your friendly neighborhood blogatrix censors herself: this really isn’t the place, and besides the nice people at P.L.A. were quite clear about not using actual descriptions of politicians inappropriate language. Nope. Not even a link.)

Cathy G. of Bainbridge, WA stopped by to discuss progress and libraries: Even if it seems to put staff on the bleeding edge, constantly courting discombobulation, she prefers that to hide-bound suspicion of new things. Happily, we both agreed that Washington Libraries (for better or worse) tended toward the former; from teen video game programs to virtual book clubs.

“Libraries today are about so much more than just a book to read.”

Agreed! But it still seems as if we have a tough job getting the word out to our patrons (even when we’re married to ‘em!)

And with that, the next shift of booth staffers began to trickle in, and our remaining time was spent in the usual changing-of-the-guard trivia.

Shift done, it was time sit down in the Green Room Exhibitor’s Lounge and type up the notes. I suppose I’m a small-town gal: The big time was interesting, but really–? I like the town fair or the high school cafeteria booths better. The hugs and squeals (from the rug rats) and the chance to Talk Book with an enthusiastic teen-ager are way more fun. On the other hand, having a note pad (or, as it could have been, a computer) to hand, rather than face-paints or badge-maker puts a distance between you and the experience. So maybe that’s not an entirely fair assessment.

Thoughts for another day. Until then: (should it ever arrive) ‘tchau!

K. Edwards, Teen Services Librarian, mom, sometime-blogger.

The discussion just ended, and boy, was it enthusiastic and involved. June Garcia and Sandra Nelson ran the session like a well-oiled machine, working through all 17 service responses in 2 hours, which is, in my mind, very impressive.

I want to say that there were 51 people in this room (one attendee was pleasantly shocked by the attendance), and the comments were concise, relevant, and really aimed at further improving the service response drafts as opposed to debating them ad nauseum.  PLA is just chock full o’ movers and shakers.

The next step is to make a few tweaks to the current drafts, post some of the comments from this discussion to the blog for further feedback and discussion hopefully by the end of the week or so, and perhaps even a new service response for review.  The projected date for completion of the service responses is March 1, 2007, and the plan is to have the entire set of service responses available for purchase as a booklet through PLA starting April 15.

Many thanks to all of the attendees of the session at ALA Midwinter, and to the readers who have contributed thus far, and will continue the discussion!

Yesterday, Saturday, January 20, I attended the “Not Your Dad’s Interface: Next Generation OPACs and Search Engines” Hot Topics session sponsored by MARS ( Machine Assisted Reference Section of RUSA). And the joint was standing room only, a fact that didn’t surprise me, but did surprise the moderator.

The purpose of the 3-presentation session was to show, to paraphrase the moderator, the next step in the evolutionary cycle of search in libraries, and how the applications implemented by the presenting libraries serve to “reduce siloization” of services and offerings. In my observation, it also shows that libraries are actively looking for improvements on the library catalog interfaces to make them easier to figure out and use, more pleasant to look at, and faster to search.

Tito Sierra from North Carolina State University spoke about their implementation of Endeca as a search interface for their library public catalog. As Endeca’s first library client, NCSU spent a lot of time helping to create an interface and decide what metadata from the catalog records to highlight through the search. The 1.6 million catalog records are exported from the catalog nightly and imported into Endeca on a nightly basis, so that the results are always fresh and clean.

On top of standard keyword searching, Endeca affords such usable features a a true browse using LC classification categories, a nifty link to a new titles search, and relevance ranking (which took some tweaking to perfect), an area that Tito believes is a huge area to be explored and improved in library catalogs. All searches, can be narrowed by “facets,” subject and information type categories, a feature now seen on Amazon.com, Open WorldCat, Koha, and a slew of retail sites. Other “search comforts” include the “Did you mean…” search feature, automated spell correction, stemming, sorting.

David Wasserman with the King County Public Libraries presented on their implementation of AquaBrowser as a visual search “discovery method”. AquaBrowser, produced by MediaLab and distributed by TLC, uses associations, context, spelling alternatives in the metadata to make connections when you look for stuff. The application is *very* visually oriented, stands alone on a separate server and ILS independent, and offers RSS feeds, to name a few cool things. Much like Endeca, the catalog records are exported nightly and imported into AquaBrowser (which lives on a separate server), keeping the search fresh and accurate.

King County set relevance as the default filter in their aquabrowser interface, which is by far the most popular search filter with users. The Additional Resources section tab on the lower right offers a federated search inclusion of databases and local library systems, passed along to those services as a basic keyword search. The Discover cloud, were the search terms are in the center and related terms branch out from the center on the ends of straight lins, is a great visual tool for the wanderer, the uncertain, the visually oriented, and some librarians hate it because it’s not for us, it’s for patrons.

While Grokker (too graphic) and Vivisimo (too texty) were considered as contenders, it was determined that AquaBrowser was just the right combination of both, and it (and the developers) really understands MARC data and how to use it. And, the cool factor totally matters, and OPACs, well, are just not cool. To paraphrase David, we owe it to our patrons to make access usable. The patron feedback reflects this view, where many statements were very positive, even so far as noting that the new AquaBrowser was “more pleasant psychologically,” and usage is at 4,000 sessions a day and growing. While some complaints were voiced about the fact that the OPAC had just been replaced, you know, it needed changing to create better access service, so they did it.

Jody Condit Fagan from James Madison University discussed usability studies she conducted on the EBSCO’s Grokker. The testing was centered around supporting student research, and the problems the visual search can potentially solve. Morae software was used to record everything happening on the screen, as well as a video recording of the student testees. Eight 1-hour sessions were conducted, including 4 groups of two because students often do research in groups, and it’s a more natural search behavior.

The Grokker Map View, which is used in EBSCO, is a nested visual interface, and within the EBSCO interface, you see Grokker on the left and the more traditional corresponding text interface on the right. Clicking on smaller circles of narrower topics within larger circles of broader topics, you can continue to refine your search. Clicking on squares will bring up the EBSCO record in the right pane.

The consensus among the testees was that the Grokker interface was best for general searching, getting to know a topic, and best to use when there was time to play and explore. The more basic text search was used most often when a student knew what they were looking for, needed more direct guidance (the faceted narrowing search topics on the left side help with this) and needed something quickly, because the interface was more familiar.

In her testing, Jody found that many people actually went beyond the first page of results when using the visual search, and they did make use of other options on the screens. The students felt like they received more options for results through the basic search, and that the visual search was not as thorough, which is actually pretty accurate, because the visual search is limited to 250 results. EBSCO is working on making Grokker use the EBSCO taxonomy, instead of allowing Grokker to generate the general topics in the big circles itself (which is what it’s doing now). Currently, 2% of EBSCO search interfaces are visual, and the visual search trend is growing, so Jody encourages showing the visual search to patrons, if you have it available.

If you have EBSCOHost, you click on the “Visual Search” tab at the top and play with this search for yourself, unless you’re one of the few libraries that have disabled this feature. To read the testing results report, you can find it in in the September 2006 issue of Information and Technology Libraries.

Alisia McManus from the University of Binghamton presented a last-minute, quick and dirty presentation on Grokker and Aleph (I love on-the-fly presentations!). She showed off the the combination as an alternative federated search tool to regular opac. There are a few quirks and qualms to the search tool, but given that it’s a work in progress, it’s to be expected. There are bits still being cleaned up, like the way that the Grokker plugin tries to pull in the metadata from the Aleph records, and her department is still working on tweaking it to be just right. They also have no full-time cataloger on the project, which would make things easier, a staffing decision they plan to revisit.

There is an obvious theme here. Catalogs and online resource sharing capabilities in libraries needs to improve, which is something that was a hot button topic in the library blog world last year. These libraries are actually making the effort to go outside of the OPAC vendor family of products to find answers, and while many other libraries would like to do the same, that requires time, money, and resources that smaller libraries and networks may not have.

Also interesting, these were fairly web 1.0 and library 1.0 options. In the Q&A session, this was questioned, and the priority was getting the information to the patrons *before* making it interactive.

The other striking theme is that the trend is to make it external. The original OPAC stays intact, but the metadata is exported to another server, and another application fixes how it presents to the patron, offering a second search option. These are libraries thinking about making an interface for users, going away from having to learn to use an OPAC (while keeping it around for those who really prefer it) to meeting the web searcher’s expectations with more usable options. Someday, everyone will need to answer the question “why have two search boxes when you can have one?” and figure out how to move over.