December 7th, 2007
Field studies were conducted with 7 universities to discover how undergraduates do research. The study was designed to be unobtrusive and very disciplined, following methods strictly.
Study parameters: solicited users who were working on a course assignment. Students were not told who was studying them and they were observed on site and remotely. For recruitment they used Facebook by advertising a $50 for 90 min. There were 8 students from each of the 7 universities (56 in total). The makeup of students were some undergrads, grads and mix of skills and disciplines. They were observed in the library, at computer labs, coffee shops and student housing. The used USERVUE to see what the students do on their computers (shares screen).
Findings: Students are time-strapped. This means high stress but they adapt to this by multi-tasking. How do students choose resources? 1) Library Outreach - it does matter - Go to the students. They DO NOT go to the library to learn about resources so the library needs to be where they are. 2) Course Instructor 3) Brand Awareness.
More Findings: According to the students, instruction on how to search was not valuable. They need the BIG PICTURE —> ie) “We have great resources, here is where you go…” 95% attempted to use the library resources. Once they got into a database they could navigate with no problem, so we need to make it easy for them to get there in the first place. For the students, abstracts were deemed essential. They do not know the difference between the catalogue search and looking for articles, so you should consider putting your federated search box right with your catalogue on your homepage. Authentication barriers: we should consider forcing authentication right up front. They don’t realize what else is available.
How do students REALLY use Google? Students don’t consider it a primary search tool, but they defaulted to it when they couldn’t get what they needed easily. They use Google as a ready reference tool just like we do.
The followed this up with a quantitative study that supported the same results - 10,000 respondents.
How do social networking sites factor into research? According to their analysis, they don’t - their lives are partitioned: Study vs Social.
Recommendations: Make resources discoverable. In a nutshell: AWARENESSS + BETTER WEBSITES + SEAMLESS AUTHENTICATION = BETTER RESULTS
Tags: research
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
December 7th, 2007
Digitization project - Robert Graves diary. When there are images on facing pages being referred to, how do you display that? “Rules for Cambeluk” - some things are difficult to represent in digital form, so they built their own WYSIWYG annotation tool in order to annotate images. People can use this tool without having to know anything about markup languages. It’s Open Source! UVic has built on this tool with SCRAPS - with the idea of capturing the context while still providing access to the item - great for archival material - scrapbooks, photo albums etc.
Posted in imagemarkup | 2 Comments »
November 13th, 2007
[speaker(s) unknown]
- Created a local catalogue from union catalogue data, via Solr
- Included Google Books fulltext search from item page
Posted in Solr | 3 Comments »
November 13th, 2007
Kevin Stanack @ SFU
- Questions that producing a scholarly journal was necessarily an expensive affair.
- Discussed open journal systems
- e.g., Partnership provides a webpage, manages workflows (peer review, editing, publishing)
- Has approx 100 journals in approx 11 languages
- Written in php
- How do they get the journals indexed, and raise visability?
- Who keeps the publication schedule on-track?
Mark D. Dahl @ Lewis & Clark, Portland, Oregon
- Enhanced OPAC to include book covers, a link to RefWorks, fulltext from Google Books, reviews.
Brown University Library
- Beta version of “easy borrow request service” for automagic ILL requesting
- Created php applications for all ‘brain dead’ search engines
- Starts with WorldCat search of OPAC. If item is available, users gets the catalogue record and a message. If the item is out, an ILL request is created.
Dan Scott @ Laurentian U
- ‘Evergreener’ at Laurentian U
- www.coffeecode.net is his site/blog
- Laurentian has e-delivery (!) of articles
Posted in journals, opac, opensource | 5 Comments »
November 9th, 2007
Ben Hyman:
- Using Evergreen, an open source ILS
- Open source, like a goat, requires a lot of care and feeding, security and housing, but gives back a whole lot
- See BC Pines website
- (Is it _free_?)
- Users are driving the innovation, and they’re carving out the future
Beth Jefferson (Oakvill PL):
- Can add rating and details/comments — can “caTAGorize this title” — genre/type, about, mood/style, personal
- Faceting is used on any retail site to drill-down
Posted in ILS, opensource | 11 Comments »
November 9th, 2007
A digital repository system needs to be _invisible_ rather than just another place that users must search.
Posted in repositories | 11 Comments »
November 9th, 2007
Interesting web form that creates a facebook application for OPAC or presumably whatever library search engine you want to make accessible through facebook.
The form (not working, but it’ll give you an idea of the work involved for you and me) is linked here.
I had a subsequent email correspondence with Dale Askey (KSU) and Jim Tuttle (NCSU). The web form isn’t free of kinks yet, and has been put on the back-burner for the next little while.
Being of the mind that the less effort I put into computer programming the happier I’ll be, I’m anxious to see this project ready for prime time. The facebook developer’s platform doesn’t make life easy for folks like me.
Posted in facebook, widgets | 19 Comments »
October 25th, 2007
“In search of intelligent search discovery.”
Richard’s vision goes something like this:
What is relevance in an OPAC? The computer doesn’t know what someone is after, but what if the system knew you were a botany student? Searching lady bug could come up with much more relevant results…Knowing the user context helps the system perform. We are making steps toward this with systems like Endeca and Primo which show the user in his/her context within the data thereby facilitating further exploration.
So what is the Talis Platform? It is a generic platform for storing, managing data. It is a service on the web. The API allows for searching through a form that then spits back XML - completely customizable. You can put it anywhere since it’s an API - for instance you could build a widget in Facebook with your data. You can choose any licence you want, but they encourage open licences under the creative commons. The platform allows you to start relating different resources together - such as the catalogue, wikipedia, courses…etc.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
October 25th, 2007
“Bringing the ocean floor to your desktop”
The Venus project will provide real time access to the ocean floor so that we can monitor it and extend the internet under water. It will cost Canadian tax payers a mere $10 million. The Neptune project is being built by UVic.
One fascinating discovery: where the Earth plates are coming apart and hot water is spewing along with chemicals, life in the form of bacteria has also been found. The observatory is collecting data at a phenomenal rate and it’s problematic because of the different data formats. They are developing a Data Management and Archiving System (DMAS). This will serve as the software link between the underwater infrastructure and the users. Their mandate is to make data available to researchers in real time. They will store data for long term time-series studies. The killer app for this project will the the automatic event detection - ie) studying earthquakes as they happen - and getting the word out about potential fallout such as tsunamis. The “Ocean Commons” is going to be the facebook for scientists - the brain behind the repository. They still need a way to automate identifying the interesting stuff from video footage (which is enormous).
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
October 25th, 2007
“…trying to figure out where are users are going and where they are at is challenging…”
Jessamyn’s advice: when teaching new users technology it’s important to choose tools that work - tools that are comfortable and easy to use.
Jessamyn talked about a site called Ask Metafilter - still in beta - where people can pose questions to businesses and companies and get answers directly from them on the site.
When teaching web 2.0 technologies, we aren’t just teaching tools, we are teaching our users how to rethink about things.
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »