Overdue Ideas

Libraries, OPACS and a changing discovery landscape II

Another take on this from Hans Geleijnse (Tilburg University, Netherlands). He is pointing out that Libraries are not only being driven to improve their services, but also do this more efficiently and in a competitive environment.

Users expect fast, mobile, secure, personalised and open access to information - to use a cliche, anytime, anywhere.

A user survey at Tilbug in 2005 of researchers and teaching staff, and saw that 97% used the electronic library services, but 70% still use physical books from the library. The most valued service are e-journals, database, current awareness services, document delivery and ILL.

However, it also showed that users are not familiar with various important electronic resource, and further, users don't want to be assisted but prefer self service. There is a real paradox here - Those surveyed said that they believed they would search better with help from a librarian, but that they didn't want this help.

In this environment, the role of the catalogue is declining and changing - and we have watched it happen, but didn't change the design of our catalogues. Along side this Tilburg have seen almost a doubling of OPAC searches from 2003 to 2005, but not a similar increase in circulation - so what is happening? On the electronic side we see an increase in searching in the electronic environment, but here we see a similar increase in use of ILL and online full-text.

Just a reflection on digitisation efforts - Hans is reminding us that the development of electronic acces to journals took 10 years - and we are just at the start of this digitisation of books - so even if e-books are currently poor in terms of functionality, we must not assume that this will continue to be the case, or that books are 'special' and different to journals.

In the world of Open Worldcat, collections can be searched via Yahoo or Google - why have a local catalogue? Perhaps to integrate with circulation, but not many other reasons? Hans suggests that the importance of the traditional local library system will decrease rapidly in the next few years.

Some quite quick skim over several areas now - e-learning (many students spend much time within their 'VLE' - and at the moment we are not seeing true integration of library systems - just linking), insitutional respositories, e-science (currently libraries not really involved in the latter, but there is a massive amount of data, and currently not organised, accessible or re-usable).

So - what should libraries be doing? We need to create partnerships with both departments, faculties, users, and also with vendors. On the other hand Library system vendors need to produce products that support the role of libraries in a changing world, and also

Universities are unique in their research and teaching. Libraries should concentrate on supporting these unique selling points and on digitizing their own unique collections. Libraries must cooperate - regionally, nationally and internationally - and outsource. Joint acquisition and outsourcing of library systems will become a realistic option. The choice of library system does not have a large impact on our user as long as it is a reasonable quality - so we should stop being so fussing.

Hans conclusions:
Role of the catalogue is declining, but do not immediately close it down
The time of 'my library should have its own local library system and its own portal system' is over
Need for more standarization and integration across domains and application areas
More cooperation at local, national and international level
Outsourcing of library functions becomes a serious option
Added value is in providing user driven, state-of-the-art and tailored service and support to teaching, learning and research.

Libraries, OPACs and a changing discovery landscape I

A series of presentations, starting with Karen Calhoun from Cornell. She is currently referencing 'Metadata switch' from E-Scholarship: A LITA Guide by Lorcan Dempsey et al. Quite an interesting way of thinking about material, splitting it between high and low 'uniqueness', and low and high 'stewardship' (how much libraries 'look after' the resources). The bulk of our physical library collection is not unique, and requires a high degree of stewardship, free web resources are also not unique (well, more accurately, are widely available), but require a low degree of stewardship.

Some stats from the OCLC environmental scan, focussing on College Students. Some of these stats are interesting, but I can't help but think that we are guilty of focussing too much on user perceptions of libraries.

Why should we be suprised that College students show a higher degree of 'familiarity' with search engines than with online library resources - this is like saying they are more familiar with WHSmith (a UK highstreet newsagent) than Grant and Cutler (a specialist foreign language bookshop)

I'm not dismissing the OCLC survey at all, but we need to make sure we aren't unrealistic in our expectations.

Some interesting stats from Cornell, showing how much their users use e-resources vs catalogue searching - which indicate that e-resources make up 10% of the collection, using 25% of the budgets, and get 50% of the library use. I almost think this provokes the opposite question to what Karen seems to be suggesting - she is comparing low e-resource searching to high search engine use (although she is using total Google searches - 441 million - which is a pointless comparison in my view), I'd say that this suggests that we need to look at navigation of our physical collection - or get rid of it.

Some more interesting outcomes from the University of Minnesota, showing that Humaities and social sciences faculty and grad students work from home, and that there is a 'market' for more help from libraries in maintaining 'local' (almost personal) collections belonging to faculty or similar.

Overall, we are seeing more use of the catalogue by Graduate students and Faculty, compared to Undergraduates.

Karen is suggesting that the 'traditional' model for providing library services is just not meeting the needs of the users.

Karen recently did a report for the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf. This says that the catalogue is no longer the centre of research, hasn't kept up with changes in user expectations, and modern retreival systems, and that the economics of traditional cataloguing no longer make sense. Apparently a real division in the community about this - IT staff and Managers welcoming the report, and others feeling very threatened by it. I guess I definitely fall into the former category being both IT and Management - but all this seems a given to me now, and not at all threatening - we need to stop obsessing about libraries as organisations, and think about them as a service - I don't care how people get to the information they need - as long as they do get to the information they need.

I also wonder if one reaction to information overload by users has been to take a pragmatic 'good enough' approach, rather than aiming for complete retrieval or 'perfect' searches.

Some stuff about Outreach now - suggesting we need to get out from behind the desk (surely we know this by now?), but also push the resources that we manage into the environment that our users work - so the open web, course management, institutional portals...

Karen says we should be thinking of linking systems rather than building, and decoupling discovery and 'inventory management' systems.

The challenge for a library such as the one I work at (http://www.rhul.ac.uk/information-services/library) is that we may not be able to afford appropriate discovery systems, and so perhaps need to essentially out-source this effort - if Google or someone else can provide the discovery tools, that's fine, as long as we can link into this (e.g. by the OpenURL).

The longer term vision Karen outlines is:

Switch users from where they find things to libraryr managed collections of all kings
Local catalog one link in a chain of services, one respository managed by the library
More coherent and comprehensive scholarly information systems, perhaps by discipline
Infastructure to permit global discovery and delivery of information among open, looslely coupled systems
Critical mass of digitized publications
[missed one point here]

So, I agree with Karen's point - that 'discovery' will take place on the open web, and libraries should focus on delivery, linking into the discovery tools that are 'out there'.

However, in the medium term, Karen sees the need for better library interface for a better user experience, drawing on the local catalogue's strongest suit - which is support for inventory control and delivery; shared online catalogues - beginning to aggregate discovery; larger scale collaboration on collection development/resource shareing and storage/preservation.

Also, starting to build bigger scholarly information environments, with libraries playing a role using their skills in Metadata and organisation, but providing these skills to scholars - not doing it for them.

Karen sees the beginning of the era of 'special collections' - that is libraries promoting their local 'high unique' and 'high stewardship' collections, along side the aggregation of discovery of digital collections.

A very interesting talk, and I agree with Karen's overall vision. I'm slighly concerned that the 'intermediary' stage is here, now, and not only are we (libraries) not keeping up, but that this stage is extremely frustrating for the user - they start in the open web, and find material they end up not being able to access - and until a utopian vision of all materials available (freely? - at point of use anyway) online, this will continue to be an issue.

Enriching the OPAC

A presentation from Ian Pattenden from Bowker about their 'Syndetic Solutions' OPAC enrichment product.

Obviously really a sales pitch, but I find this an interesting area - do cover shots 'enhance' an academic library catalogue, or are they superfluous, and a distraction from the real business of looking for library material?

Syndetic Solutions provides 17 'data elements' for OPAC enrichment - cover shots, tables of contents, sample chapters, author notes, reviews, etc. (see below) and the currently cover 2.8 million books, and growing.

One issue I have with this service is that it is hosted, so the information doesn't get integrated into your catalogue. Ian is presenting this as 'simple', but for me it is a wasted opportunity. If we are going to add ToC to our catalogue, I'd like them to be searchable.

The links are done by ISBN, which means that it doesn't apply to any of our Audio-Visual material of course, as well as items without ISBNs.

The data elements available are:
Cover images (1.7 million, increasing by 10k per week)
First chapters and Excerpts (from books published from 2000 onwards)
Tables of Contents (about 800,000, rising to 1 million by the end of 2007)
Summaries and Annotations (taken from book jackets and publishers)
Book Reviews and Author notes
Awards (e.g. Pulitzer Prize etc.)
Series (e.g. fiction series in reading order)
Profiles/Search for similar titles (e.g. based on the fact a book is about a single mother detective, you can find other books about single mother detectives)

Some examples
http://aleph.aub.auc.dk
http://nuin.napier.ac.uk

More detail is available at http://www.syndetics.com, and Bowker can do you a ISBN match report before you buy the service (they find match rates vary between 30% and 60%). Price is based on the number of English Language books for academic libraries, or annual circulation for other libraries

Finally, free trial access is also possible (apparently there is an Ex Libris KB item - KB6850 - on how to set this up).

MetaLib/SFX - usability and organizational impact

A study from Jonkoping University.

From the library perspective MetaLib/SFX offers a single point of entry for multiple library resources, and MetaLib/SFX are updated centrally, which is much easier than local libraries trying to keep track of the all available resources.

The study was based on a series of workshops with library staff, and how they expected it to affect their work, and with end-users of MetaLib.

The study was qualitative, but it seemed to indicate that MetaLib resulted in better exposure of all available resources, but the end-users find it difficult to interact with MetaLib.

MetaIndex - 'Clearly a Success'

A presentation from Ari Rouvari and Ere Maijala - seemingly tireless developers from the National Library of Finland where they work on MetaLib.

MetaIndex is a product to build index into MetaLib - it harvests metadata from other resources, and creates a searchable index on a central server. However, from the users perspective, it is just another federated search target for MetaLib to search.

It relies on the OAI-PMH to harvest metadata, and you can use it when you can't do a federated search using a standard protocol (like z39.50, or SRU/SRW)

Some examples of it in use are DOAJ and E-LIS, Electra, E-thesis local collections, Music collection of Pirkanmaa Polytechnic.

In Finland they have a Nation wide unlimited license to for MetaIndex, so they can create as many as they want. However, they found that they had to be managed centrally.

Overall, they have found the MetaIndex an extremely powerful, and felt that the importance of OAI-PMH and the ability to create indexes is comparable to OpenURL and SRU in terms of impact and importance.

Students' Experience of MetaLib and Google Scholar

This is by Glenn Haya from Stockholm University and Else Nygren from Uppsala University. This was a study done in Sweden, where there is a national MetaLib consortium.

It may be interesting to compare this with the analysis Marco did last year of Google Scholar.

The study has just be completed - although it looks like quite a weighty tome - you can read it online (still waiting for a link on this).

The big questions they hoped to answer were:

What happens when a student sits down with Google Scholar or Metalib and tries to search for material? (interestingly there seemed to be more written about MetaLib than Google Scholar here)
What role does instruction play in the experience?

They used 32 students, and were asked to do searching, one group with training, and one without. Each student was recorded using software calle 'More' (or Moray?), which records audio, video, mouse clicks, keyboard strokes. These were advanced and intermediate undergraduates who were writing a thesis - and the searching was on their thesis topic.

It's worth noting that the MetaLib implementation lacked certain functionality that is available in the product in general - specifically the personalisation aspects. Also it looks like SFX is implemented within Google Scholar.

Anyway - down to the analysis:

They found that there were specific phases to the search process:
Navigation
Beginning
Search
View Results list
(View Metadata)
View Full-text
Save Full-text

They graphed how much time was spent on each of these phases as their search session progressed.

Some interesting results on the quick set screen - the search immediately tried to select multiple quick sets.
Then, where there was a problem, then the searcher just added another search term - and so got far too specific in their search - and got no results. Then hits the back button - which doesn't work. The user never got to a full-text article.

To compare Google Scholar and MetaLib:

Phase	Google (Time %)	MetaLib (Time %)
Beginnging	0.6	3.9
Searching	15.3	15.9
Viewing Results	30.9	11.2
Viewing Metadata	5.1	11.0
Viewing Fulltext	30.0	3.9
Saving Fulltext	2.1	1.0
Navigation	15.8	52.9

About half the searches carried out in MetaLib did not produce a results list.

Training made a large difference in how many articles were saved when using MetaLib (from 12 to 30). However, compare these to Google - 37 to 48.

Looking at the quality of the articles found, what was interesting was that before training with Google scholar only 21% were peer-reviewed. However, after training, this became 48%. With MetaLib the percentage stayed persistent at 42% before and after training. Some suspicion that the improvement with Google was due to the use of the SFX link in the Google Scholar results, leading the users to pay more attention to those articles available from the University via SFX.

Some considerations - Google is essentially a familiar interface, and the user expectations are geared towards this. MetaLib is a more complex application, and is designed to do more than Google Scholar. It is also true that perhaps for Undergraduate level Google Scholar is 'good enough'?

A comment for MetaLib team is that in v4, the default search will be keyword - but it is currently phrase - which leads to the problems with multiple terms mentioned above.

However, I think the biggest issue here is the amount of time spent on Navigation in MetaLib. Whatever way you interpret the results, 50% of the 'searching' time spent 'navigating' surely is a bad thing?

Decoupling the interface

Since there has been some talk at the conference of de-coupling the user interface from 'back office' systems (tomorrow we have several sessions on Primo, which is the approach Ex Libris is taking to this), I thought that this development blogged by Lorcan Dempsey was worth a look - a user driven approach to decoupling the experience.

Library way: "E41ST uses Flex 2, Amazon web services, and 'your public library' to connect an Amazon browsing experience with a look up in a local public library.

Deep linking in Ex Libris products

The last session this morning is a Q and A with Ex Libris. I'm not blogging most of it, as I wouldn't want Ex L to feel inhibited in their discussion, and most of it isn't terribly interesting to the world at large.

However, one question has come up, that was also raised in the integration session this morning, which is about providing persistent deep links into Ex Libris products.

For example, this might be to deep link to a 'search' in the library catalogue, or to deep link to a specific resource within MetaLib.

This cannot be just for Ex Libris products - when we link to a library catalogues web interface to do a search, each vendor has a different link syntax. Perhaps some implementation of SRU?

Standardisation would make work such as the work we have done with Moodle and deep linking into our library systems easier to share, and transferable over different product versions and suppliers.

MetaLib and Usability

Nick has left a comment on the post on MetaLib developments regarding usability (as opposed to accessibility), and I thought it was worth a post. In fact, a later session today covers a usability study.

I'd agree that there are usability issues for MetaLib. However, one message that has been consistently sent to Ex Libris over the last few years is that changing the interface is a huge amount of work for libraries, as it means retraining patrons, and this is bad for PR as well as requiring large amounts of work.

I'm very happy that we aren't seeing substantial changes, as although it may not be an incredibly intuitive interface, the majority of our users have now been using the interface for at least a year.

In terms of continued development of the interface, Ex Libris has been asked about development of the Aleph OPAC in the light of Primo, and have given a committment to keep developing this, and I guess that the same will be true of the MetaLib interface.

One other point that has come through strongly at this conference is that with a complex product like MetaLib, it is unlikely that Ex Libris can deliver an interface that suits everybody (anybody?). Also, many institutions are interested in integrating MetaLib into other environments (portal, VLE, etc.) This leads to the x-server being even more important - and this is the method by which individual institutions can provide an interface which suits their particular requirements.

Library integration into Course Management

The other panelists (including me) are now covering work at their instiutions (so excuse any sudden cut off as I have to speak!)

Firstly, Peter van Boheemen (Wageningen University, NL). They use Blackboard and Sharepoint. They have developed a function to allow the building of 'course libraries' in the library system. When the tutor links from the course to the library system, they are automatically logged in as the owning 'course' rather than a personal login. This sounds a bit like the work done at Westminster a few years ago, where MetaLib e-shelves were setup for each course...

Secondly, Kingsley Boulton (York, UK). They are using Sentient 'Discover' product for reading lists, and Blackboard for a VLE (apparently the Sentient product is now being acquired by another company, and will be called just 'Discover'). They are only adding reading lists for those courses that have a Blackboard presence. They have a 'e-learning librarian' to do this work. They went live in January this year, and used a Blackboard 'building block' (developed by Sentient) to integrate. The reading lists are completely controlled by the academics. The idea is that library staff will rely very much on the lists in Discover to get details of what academics need purchasing, moving to short loan etc. User feedback at York has been generally positive. York are also looking at a building block to integrate MetaLib with Blackboard using a 'Building block' and the x-server. The aim is to have single sign-on between Blackboard and MetaLib, and be able to present specific MetaLib resources based on the student enrolments.

Thirdly, Bob Gerrity (Boston College, USA) is going to talk about using DigiTool with the University environment. At Boston College there is a IDETS (Instructional Design/e-Teaching Services) who work along side library staff to deliver services for e-learning. Bob's got an interesting list of strengths for the library team, and IDETS team - something they try to keep in mind as they work together.

Boston College have already done hooks to library resources (from WebCT) - search forms, deep linking, links to subject specialists - this sounds very similar to what we have done at RHUL so far.

However, they are now starting to use DigiTool to provide a platform for faculty members to create digital object repositories, which they can then use, and reuse, in their teaching. Bob is showing an example of pictures relating to Rome created by a fine arts students. An interesting aspect here is that the IDETS team provide a 'rationale' to the library to start the creation of such a collection, and the integration into learning objects.

This 'Rome' project is 461 images in DigiTool (in different versions), built a UI in Flash, which interacts with DigiTool with web-servercies API, php and the DigiTool PID, with supplementary material from Grove dictionary of art - a prototype seems to be available at Some impressive stuff, here, and our recent online picture gallery could have been done using exactly this technique - if we had DigiTool. Bob, said that they could probably develop several such resources per year, but in comparisson to the number of faculty and courses, this is just a drop in the ocean...

My talk seemed to go down well, and I'll try to blog to detail later.