Is Deakin University Library the first Australian University Library to offer a library search box for users to install on their Facebook profile? Looks nice.
Yarra Plenty Regional Libraries have had a Facebook Page for a month or so, and released their search box ap. on December 6th . I had trouble installing it when I tried, but it may have been a temporary bug.
Does anyone know of any other Australian libraries who have Facebook Pages or have written a search box application?
As I’ve said before, I wish my library had the funds for a coding wizard who was given time to work on new projects to enhance our library systems,Grow your own OPAC…but save those kittens. I think a position like this would be useful to:
I also think that, like most libraries, we are stretched for funds and at this stage a library developer would be on a “dream on” list.
But….dreaming on…here’s an example of how just a couple of lines of javascript on the footer of a record display template can value add enormously. When I compare the cost to hire someone to do this, as opposed to the huge purchase costs of an off the shelf module, I begin to wonder about whether I should be quite so quick to dismiss a library developer as a luxury. (Lest I sound too optomistic, I do realise that their are issues like maintenance and LibraryThing’s business model to consider)
Danbury Library has added data from LibraryThing to its III catalogue, Danbury, CT kicks off LibraryThing for Libraries!
Their records now include a list of “other editions” plus “translations and similar books”. You can click on a tag and see what else in the library has the same tag. It harvests the data from LibraryThing – using information from thousands of LibraryThing users who have used it to catalogue their home collections in plain English, not from cataloguers.
In their record for Jane Eyre, (image below), the last three fields are generated from LibraryThing’s data.
I tried it this morning and the tag browser was too slow to be useful, but the “other editions” and “similar books” looked fantastic.
It’s not perfect, it is developmental and it is FREE. Here’s some more information about the project from the Thingology post.
How it works. Perhaps the most remarkable thing here is the relative ease with which Danbury added the feature. Danbury has an Innovative Interfaces OPAC (“WebPac”), but LibraryThing for Libraries is platform agnositic. There is no back-end integration–no one at Danbury had to call their vendor. Ultimately, it involved just a few lines of JavaScript pasted into the page footer. It works on any modern browser. It causes your tea service to fill with magical gold. Okay, not that.
Caveats.
Some things we’re working on:
- So far, it only knows ISBN books.
- The Tag Browser is not fast enough. This can be improved, no question.
- There are some wrinkles in the tag data, particularly in marginal cases. Some of this will go away, but not all of it.
- There are some character problems, like the tag “C++” turning into “C.”
- In the rush to get the feature out, we forgot to give Danbury the “noscript” tag, so that users with JavaScript turned off can enjoy the enhanced content.
Improvements:
- We wanted to start with non-interactive features. We love user tagging, but wanted to show what out existing data could do without any additional patron data. There are also sticky privacy issues there. But, of course, this is a direction we’ll be moving in.
The Future. Getting one library out takes a lot of pressure off us. We’ve been doing a lot of custom work to show potential customers what we’re going to offer. With a major test case live, we can cut back on that. We’ve also learned a lot more about the problems of importing library data, and are making progress there. We’ll moving into “production” mode, and getting back to other libraries soon.
Circuses? They’re all about performing animals and clowns that do slapstick and must have a ringmaster with a big black moustache, right?
Libraries? They’re all about books and being quiet and must have a circulation desk and a reference desk, right?
I’m just back from ooohing and aaahing at the latest offering from Circus Oz called Laughing at Gravity (gotta love those puns). Their high energy performance showed how circuses have morphed to fit their audience. The ring master was a high octane woman with glam silver boots, a style which crossed diva with Frank’N’Furter and who belted out songs like “La Vie En Rose” and a piece about trying to be an object of female beauty in the age of global warming.
There were no animals involved, but people doing amazing things with their bodies and circus apparatus. The style was distinctly Australian, but edgy and owed a lot to musical comedy – although much more Caberet than Oklahoma. One of my favourite parts was the strong woman who did a bendback, had three concrete slabs placed on her abdomon and then…and then….kept still while a man with a sldegehammer smashed the slabs to smithereens. They even incorporated new technology – a bloke who swang out on a rope, missed his target and kept swinging until he hit a wall and…stuck!. The velcro fuzz on the front of his tracksuit met the velcro hooks of the wall.
Yesterday, I heard from a library manager who, like Circus Oz, has been transforming his craft to fit his audience. Chris Szekely ,who has just finished as City Librarian of Manukau in New Zealand, gave the closing keynote at the loclib biennial conference. The conference is aimed at Western Australian public librarians, but some of us from other sectors (Hi Sue!) came along for a couple of presentations from US library blogging legend, Jesssamyn West (Hi Jessamyn!).
Chris described how they redefined and repositioned their services when they were faced with a growing population, the need for more libraries but not many more staff allocated. Among other points he described the Botany Library, the Idealibrary (gotta love those puns), which was built in a new retail hub taking a lot of service ideas and design elements from the surrounding shops. There are no service desks, but staff who wander the floor restocking, serving the customers and acknowleding everyone who walks in within 90 seconds of entry. They implemented RFID as a security system – which lets someone checking out their entire limit of 35 items to do so by placing them in a single pile on the self-check machines.
An area aimed at youth (covertly – not with signage!!) takes design from night clubs, with a mezzanine and subdued neon lighting and a disco ball. Magazine displays compete with those in nearby newsagents. Display walls of books, which look like bays in a video shop, can be turned to create a separate space for study or events. A quiet area is enforced not by signage or staff, but by having a totally different ambience to the rest of the building. The Staff were chosen not for librarianship skills, per se, but for their ability to fit the customer service model. Consequently, 90 percent of the staff are men under 25. A very unusual proportion in a traditional library.
Like Circus Oz, we need to embrace new technologies, define the core of what we do and then highly hone those skills – maybe throw in a bit of glitter and disco – and continue to do our best to delight our audiences.
MPOW recently switched on a function on our III Opac which allows users to add a star rating to items in the catalogue. In one of those late night conversations in Second Life, I showed it to Dave Pattern, who was motivated by the green tinge he felt to code his own version and pop it over his Dynix installation. Gee I wish I had the skills to code that.
Today he’s casually mentioned that the University of Huddersfield will go live with user comments on the OPAC in the next week. Gee I wish I had the skills to code that.
But..Dave, in turn, has said “Gee I wish I had time to do that”….about….
John Blyberg…..
….. who has created a “social OPAC” interface which sits over Ann Arbor’s III Innopac library management system. It allows user rating, tagging and reviews. He’s released the code as well. And made a screencast to show how to use it.
Dave would “kill a box of cute kittens with my bare hands to be able to take on a project like this“. Well, John and Dave, I’d care for a box of cute kittens until they were grown (infinitely more of a sacrifice) to have the coding skills to do what you guys are doing.
Keep it up. Please keep sharing…and those of us with lesser skills promise to try to persuade those higher up in the food chain at our workplaces that guys like you need time and support to do what you do. We’ll even try to change things so we can care for any “free as in kittens” services you produce.
OK..so I can’t have an iPhone until January 2008 here in Australia, but I can be happy with what my Co-Pilot brought back with the shopping today.
(Didya know the iPhone has no buttons at all…..?)
(And if you turn the screen sideways, the display changes to landscape….?)
(I’m happy with what I’ve got..I am…really..)
Anyhow..I sent him out to get one of these:
Seagate 2.5GB pocket hard drive
Because I’d borrowed the 5GB version from a friend and I now need something bigger than my 2GB thumbdrive. I use my work laptop and home PC about 50/50 and keep backing one up to the other and driving myself mad trying to find files.
Anyhow..he told me that for about twice the price I could by one of these, like my friend’s one:
Seagate 5GB pocket hard drive
But mentioned that for the same price I could get this:
It’s a teeny weeny 60 GB hard disk. It’s powered from the USB port, so no chunky power adaptor to cart around…just something a little bigger than my PDA.
It’s mine now. I’m happy.
(Until the iPhone comes to me anyhow).
Wondering why that portable hard drive you’ve been lusting after for the last 4 months is suddenly much cheaper? And why flash drives are suddenly dime a dozen?? And what’s with all those LCD TVs suddenly cheaper?……Maybe it’s just Christmas marketing..or maybe…
… because in the USA, the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show is happening.Bill Gates spoke today, Michael Dell (yes, THAT Dell) speaks Tuesday Jan 9th. It’s big.
It’s also where the new gadgets and gizmoes are given their first outing. The manufacturers know that once we see those babies, that technothing we’ve been drooling over for the last few month is going to look..well….so very ’06.
Not too much has caught my eye, but I’ve been mildly interested in the HP MediaSmart Server powered by WindowsHome Server.
The new OS version was developed to help consumers deal with managing media across multiple PCs and devices in the home, and will provide automagic backup functionality and remote access as well as central file storage and management.
And has Sony really added RSS to television?
If the happenings at CES is the type of thing you like to track, then it’s definitely worth subscribing to a feed for a search, like the technorati tag. CES.
A change is happening in how we relate to our documents and data. We’re moving toward using them as social spaces.
At conferences, where the presentations and papers (the “data”) are the ostensible reason for people to be there, I’ve always found the informal exchange (the “social”) much more fun and beneficial. This is now happening online. Here’s some examples of what I mean…
1. Adding a “meebo me” widget to your library home page. Users don’t have to leave the site to connect with a librarian.
2. A “discuss” function in google docs. Ryan, the Other Librarian, and I have been sharing a couple of google docs while we work on a library related something. Last night I noticed the “discuss” tab on a shared spreadsheet and emailed him so we could test it out. While “in” the document, we were chatting, and uploading and amending the document. We could have opened another document and continued our chat there. He’s in Canada, and – while I can pretend to be a jaded, 2.0 kind of gal, used to the way the net has shrunk the world – I still found it novel and it gave me a buzz.
3. A couple of weeks ago I blogged on VLINT about visiting the Michigan Library Consortium’s library in Second Life and climbing all over a 3D graph they had, representing library membership.
4. Distance learning in Second Life. I can imagine a building set up with all the resources needed for a class…links to external sites and cached documents..video presentations available on a player. The difference between that and a tradtional web site is that students can send their avs. to that “place” and see who else is there. While accessing the info, they can discuss their experience of the course and are more likely to ask each other for help once they have made that casual contact. More like the intangible social and academic benefits gained by going to lectures or tutes on campus.
TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Up until now
When people ask me “what do you work as?”, I can easily say “Reference Librarian and Philosophy Subject librarian”. The other bit of my job, which is looking at emerging technologies and how we can use them in our library, doesn’t have an official label or job title.
Back in June, when thinking about what Librarian 2.0 jobs would look like for Australian libraries, I said:
I suspect Librarian 2.0 positions will be created as people in existing positions redefine their jobs and add a bit here, drop a few responsibilities there.
I’m really excited by a trend in the US, one that I hope will hit here. Entire postitions are being created for librarians to do tasks that didn’t even exist 2 or 3 years ago. I’m encouraged by the Emergent Technology Librarian at East Michigan University Library and the ten (yes, ten!!) new positions being funded at the Albany Library at the State University of New York.
1. EMERGENT TECHNOLOGIES LIBRARIAN at the East Michigan Univeristy Library
I chuckled when the ad posted on Web4Lib said they were looking for an applicant with “mad skillz”. Made me feel about 100 years old and terribly unhip.
Position Description:
The Eastern Michigan University Library seeks a proactive, creative, service-oriented individual to play a key role on its Information Services Team. The Emergent Technologies Librarian will serve as an explorer of and advocate for the use of emergent technologies to support online learning and enhance the effectiveness of library information and instructional services . The Emergent Technologies librarian will coordinate virtual/chat reference initiatives and provide scheduled reference assistance (face-to-face, email, telephone, virtual/chat).
Responsibilities:
Laura Cohen’s library has just received “huge, anonymous donation to fund ten new positions for as long as we want them”. (Yes, Virginia, there is a Library Santa Claus). They’ve set aside one position to use later. With the other positions, they are dreaming big, and realise that there is overlap between the positions:
and the one that really caught my fancy…. After 38 years, I finally know what I want to do when I grow up!!
9. Exploration and Training Librarian:
Does what all librarians should do but wlll get to do it full time: read, experiment, play, develop skills, listen to conference and training broadcasts, imagine and ruminate. Will develop a seminar program to present colleagues with the results of these efforts. Will assist colleagues in determining new ways of doing things based on these explorations. Will recommend readings, Web sites, podcasts, RSS feeds, etc., to assist in staff education. Establishes a culture of fun-loving, beta-craving, humorous attitude toward change.
TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD Let go of the past
UPDATE: A couple of hours after I wrote this, into my aggregator popped an article from Michael Stephens on ALA Techsource that nicely summarises the last year of Librarian2.0 job descriptions in the US. Desperately seeking the adaptive librarian: on the 2.0 job description (part 3) .
UPDATE AGAIN: 1 January 2007: Alas, There is no Library Santa Claus, please see Laura Cohen’s comment below. I could pretend that I wasn’t taken in, but instead I’ll admit to being very sloppy and not reading carefully, and say I’m very sorry that I didn’t pay closer attention to what she wrote. She did actually list 10 positions, including “Digitization Librarian”. On her blog, Library 2.0, And Academic’s Perspective, you can see more of Laura’s thinking about how we need to reformulate all library job descriptions to meet the demands of Library2.0.
Just visited my local public library for the first time in about 3 months.
They’ve upgraded their website and a new feature caught my eye. New users can create a temporary membership online. This allows them to reserve items today, and provide their ID when they come to collect the item. A quick trawling of the web reveals this is probably “bog standard” with the Spydus ILS. I also liked the “item not in our library – fill in this request form and we’ll try to get it” option.
As someone who once joined up 4 family members at a loans desk, while trying to control a bored two year old, I applaud this. I would have loved to have entered our family’s details at my leisure and then known that what I wanted was ready for pickup BEFORE I ventured to the new library.
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I registered both kids for an interactive storytelling of Charlotte’s Web with riveting “get-em-up-off-their-bums-and-moving” storyteller, Glenn Swift next month. Having visited Narnia with him last year and re-enacted the battle scene in the library with spaghetti string and balloon swords, they can’t wait (OK…me neither!).
Mr 9 also joined in the Australia wide Summer Reading Club..after seeing at the front door the cool prizes he could win. He received a very nice “showbag” of reading related activities, including a “choose your book type” flowchart quiz, that steered him toward book choices that would suit him. He gets to go to a party where they dish out the prizes at the end of January.
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The library also had very bright new signage – not just a small part of the shelf labelled, but large cardboard cutouts taking up the entire side of the shelf, top to bottom. Very clear and made each shelf feel individual, and like it held an adventure.
I left the library as one happy user.
TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Gentle Okayness
I’m always fascinated by people using blogs creatively.
One of the students at my uni needs help picking his new glasses frames. The terms of his health insurance means he has to do it by 31 December. On his blog, he’s posted pictures of himself wearing different frames and would like people to use comments to vote on the best.
He’s shortsighted, so can’t see what he looks like in the mirror..without his glasses.
Give him your opinion as a Christmas present……