Drift through the music!

Here’s an interesting one: Musicovery. Give it a think: can you imagine something like this applied to a library/information browse scenario?

Systems: III Encore

There seems to be quite a lot of discord on the SirsiD lists in the US Unicorn world regarding iLink, EPS (SirsiD’s portal frontend) and futures. A number of them have referred to something called Encore, from Innovative, which I’d not come across (http://www.iii.com/encore/main_index2.html).

Looks like Encore is not included in III’s standard OPEC but has to be bought add-on even by existing III libraries. Looking at the examples below, it would appear the underlying OPACs remain available for advanced searching. Also perhaps slightly disappointing is Encore’s use of a tag cloud to refine, rather than extend, searching.

III’s Encore page isn’t particularly forthcoming but it does claim 50 recent sales, including to Aleph and Voyager libraries and to UK libraries. I couldn’t find any UK ones but there’s one in Nashville that looks quite interesting. Go to Nashville Public Library and tell me what you think. One at Westerville also looks pretty well out of the box.

Worth looking at?

New breed of OPACs

Rummaging around the web – as you do – I came across a company called Endeca offering new ways of searching and presenting data in a whole range of industries. This led me to look at the NCSU catalogue and I liked what I saw. Easy searching and results presented in a way that allows refinement. NCSU are a Sirsi Unicorn customer which is why it caught my attention.

What Endeca says about itself.

“Endeca for Libraries is the most effective way for students, faculty and other members of the library community to find the book or resource they need and to discover new information they didn’t even know the library owned. That’s why North Carolina State University saw an increase of 240% in keyword searching after deploying Endeca. Endeca’s superior search integrated with the patented Guided Summarization experience encourages exploration and discovery. That experience increases usage of the library’s resources, increases re-circulation, and increases usage of legacy library collections.” http://endeca.com/byIndustry/media/libraries.html

See also http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/endeca/ for publications and presentations about the implementation of the OPAC.

Seeing this reminded me of another library browser that a colleague brought to my attention some time ago. The AquaBrowser is far more visually exciting. Check out the Dumfries and Gallloway catalogue . http://library.dumgal.gov.uk/abl/

What AquaBrowser says about itself.

“AquaBrowser Library’s capabilities transcend the limits of conventional OPAC searching. Its search front-end finds items using associations, context, and spelling alternatives automatically generated from your library’s catalog. AquaBrowser Library offers the first progressively interactive searching experience your users have ever encountered.” http://www.medialab.nl/?page=aquabrowserlibrary/overview

Does anyone know why the penetration of these browsers is so small in UK libraries?

mediaWiki for subject guides

Meredith Farkas relates how she and her colleagues have used media wiki to present subject guides to their users. She makes an interesting point that students use a task-based approach rather than a general subject approach. I certainly identify with this as a perpetual student myself; whether learning about web technologies or languages.

Meredith Farkas

…I love that the guides are searchable and that we can assign categories to each page to allow students to browse as well. While we don’t have a ton of categories now, we may in the future.

…Probably my favorite part of the subject guides is the focus on how-to’s. More general subject guides are great, but usually students are trying to accomplish something more specific. They’re not doing “architecture research” — they’re looking for information on a specific building or architect or design style. They’re not doing “English research” — they’re looking for literary criticisms, book reviews, etc. That’s why I think a task-based orientation works so much better than a subject-oriented one. The majority of the questions we get at the desk are from students trying to do the same few things and now we have guides that address those specific things that students are trying to accomplish.

JIBSUG seminar

Last year Kathy, Alain and I attended a JIBSUG seminar on web 2.0. I just wanted to list a ppt from talks I found interesting. It was a talk by Dave Pattern, who I believe is a computer scientist at Huddersfield.

Making the catalogue a good place to be – lipstick, cowbells and serendipity, Dave Pattern. In his talk, Dave showed many old hat e-commerce functionality applied to Opacs, the best applications being the ‘did you mean?’ spelling assist and the ‘other users who borrowed this, also borrowed…’. Moreover, he justified the applications with well reasoned aims and good statistical analysis to follow.

The other talks were the usual web 2.0 case studies. The use of Facebook at the British Library was interesting but only relevant to those who host ‘cubism exhibitions’ and the like.

notes from a conference

This was from June earlier in the week.

This is Jeff’s blog (how does he do that snap thing, where by you get an image as you roll over the url?)

There is also and article about the [Canadian] library.I thought I had a copy of his powerpoint given at SCONUL but at the moment I can not find it! I have found the following blog though on the site.

What coference was it you went to June? I think this blog will answer you’re question June. WorPress include “snap thing” link roll overs.

Worcester blog

Alain earlier this week on blogs…

For info: you might have already seen the following notes on the recent UKSG seminar caught up in web 2.0?

I was quite interested (among other things) in the bit about what they do with blogs in Worcester. This might not be right for us, but it’s nonetheless good for us to keep an eye on these things.