Author: Ross

Last Thursday/Friday I decided to put my development time where my mouth is and actually try to fiddle around with A9’s Opensearch. Earlier in the week, I had told my boss that I wanted to do this and that I didn’t think it would take much time or energy.

Her reaction was:

1. What is Opensearch?
2. Ok, now that I know what Opensearch is, why on earth would anybody choose to search Georgia Tech’s catalog in their web search?

At the time, my argument centered around the fact that I was only using our catalog because it would be a fairly simple exercise to get working with Opensearch. If it seemed viable and simple to do, the real project would be to get our DSpace repository searchable this way. Since my proposal wasn’t really gaining much momentum with her, I tried to sweeten the pot by noting that our environment was set up exactly like the Library of Congress’s (SRW/U via Yazproxy to a Voyager database), and if they found it useful… well, wouldn’t it make Tech look good to have the LoC using something we developed?

Ok, I realize this definitely makes me seem like sort of Iago whispering weasely ideas into Othello’s head but there is some truth to it and if the end-product is a success (or even if the LoC is passingly interested in it), I think there’s some “good to be gotten”. Having an agenda isn’t necessarily wrong. Using other people’s desire to increase our profile in the community to further that agenda probably is, though. Oh well… enough of my cravenness.

So, in an effort to expand my horizons a bit and to try to make this a little more portable (you know, just in case the Library of Congress is interested…), I decided to try to develop this Opensearch to SRU thingy in python. Dan and Ed have been advocating python for a while now (as has my friend Tom… apparently python is heavily used in XBox hacks). The #code4lib sprint at ALA will probably be python-based, so I thought I better start getting familiar with the language a bit. I had dived into python a couple of months ago to try my hand at unalog development, but reality stepped in and dragged me back to PHP. I always do better if I have an actual objective, anyway.

By the time I left for a mini-vacation (ah, so therapeutic!) on Friday, I had a mostly working prototype (thanks to Dan for some python pointers). In fact, it was a completely working prototype except for the fact that it wasn’t encoding xml entities (so, keep it in lower ASCII, folks!), which is, of course, less than ideal. I should be able to fix that today.

Right now the query requires either “keyword anywhere” or minimal knowledge of CQL. The nice thing about CQL is that it actually makes quite a bit of sense.

• author=Hemingway
• subject=biology and title=”Introduction to biology”

This syntax either needs to be made apparent in the Opensearch column description (less than ideal) or it needs to be translated from however A9 would define this sort of thing.

On my train ride in this morning, I began to think about the conversation with my boss about this project again. Even if our potential user base is relatively small, isn’t this exactly the sort of thing we want them to be able to do? From a search engine or any search of any sort, wouldn’t we want to also be able to show relevant resources from our own collection? Yes, the user would need to add the column (strike one!) to their A9 search results (strike two! They’re at Google!), but if it’s easy enough to implement, why wouldn’t we offer this? A metasearch would certainly be more ideal to expose our collections, but I don’t have access to that right now and I haven’t figured out how A9 deals with access controlled content, anyway.

One of the goals of the redesigned OPAC project is to create human parseable, crawler-friendly urls so these avenues of discovery can be opened. There is no good technical reason that web opacs place the session information in the url (my guess it is for backwards compatibility with cookieless browsers).

Wouldn’t these urls make a lot more sense:

• http://gil.gatech.edu/isbn/0632044160
• http://gil.gatech.edu/author/Wilson, David L./title/Introduction to biology
• http://gil.gatech.edu/issn/1465-7392
• http://gil.gatech.edu/title/Nature cell biology

urlencoded, of course.

Things like this seem so simple for providing a little better access to our collections from the outside world.

So as Art and I continue to try to export the data from our respective Voyager catalogs to create an alternative web opac, I have been trying to formulate what such a beast should look like. We have the opportunity to make the web interface look and behave in any way we want, so there are a lot of things to think about. The goal is to make the opac behave in the way non-information professionals would expect a searching interface to work, so we’re not just talking about a cosmetic makeover to the current design.

We just had a professional usability study done on our web site and services. The results were rather sobering. While not every aspect of our web presence is bad, a great deal of it is, and, worse, the bad parts are generally the most important. Making the situation even more complicated is the fact that a lot of these awkward interfaces are not under our control (the databases, ejournals and opac). Well, not currently under our control.

I’ll skip over the part about our website (we’re able to fix that pretty easily) and write about what they recommended for the catalog. The first screen they gave us was a redesigned search form. An interesting dialogue came out of that:

Usability Expert: Ok, so this is the search form…
Librarian(s): So… is this the simple search form or the advanced search?
Usability Expert: This is the search form.

And it really is as simple as that. It is a text input field that, by default, would do a keyword natural language query on the catalog, or you could add limits and filters (title, author, subject, etc.) or make a more sophisticated boolean search using the exact same form.

The other screen they showed was a full record page for a journal. It was extremely well laid out, but I noticed that it had a lot of visual clues in the page that item you were looking at was a journal. This is another incredibly simple feature. Different types of resources can have their own layout based on what is logical for that type of resource. Also, we could conceivably display electronic holdings from SFX in our opac interface, so the user doesn’t have to click on the SFX button (or generic 856 link) and open the SFX window to see if an issue is available electronically. We could also, at this point, give recommendations of other resources that might be valuable (such as A&I databases that this particular journal appears in).

The usability study was extremely useful for looking at the opac through non-library eyes, but with a view focused on making things more useful.

Last week I began trying to visualize how to lay out search results. The initial design, I think, will look something like:
Your search for “Ernest Hemingway” resulted in:
167 Total Items :: 102 Books :: 50 Videos :: 2 Journals :: 13 Audiobooks :: 1,072 Items from GIL Express

With each of those being tabs to view different types of resources (plus a link to our state union catalog at the end). The goal is to be somewhat A9-ish, but I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the column layout.

I am, however, a huge fan of the folksonomy. I definitely plan on implementing user-supplied subject headings. We want to implement a del.icio.us style social bookmarking/citation management system here anyway (probably using unalog), and it seems like this would fit in quite well with that. I wouldn’t actually expect users to just add “tags” to things without some sort of personal gain, so if it was incorporated into a “bookbag” system, it might actually get used. Although the idea of just leaving breadcrumbs around the opac (and databases) might be useful if they don’t want to clutter up their bookmark pages with a ton of items. This is something that we can play around with. Mark Leggott talks about adding folksonomic support in the University of Winnipeg’s alternative opac project, as well. Interestingly, I had no idea Mark was working on something like this (rob caSSon, at the University of Miami, Ohio, is also working on a similar project. Miami and Winnipeg are both III sites; perhaps they should get in touch with each other).

Over the weekend (yes, I get a touch obsessed about my job), I began thinking about the utility of displaying dust jackets in the opac. When I was designing a new books list application at Emory, it seemed “obvious” to include dust-jackets in the results. I mean, that’s what Amazon does and it’s user-friendly, right? Well, while I was thinking about it this weekend, I started wondering how useful this really was. What is the purpose of showing the dust jacket? It certainly won’t help the user much if they go into the stacks to find the book… we rebind everything in those boring red/green/gray/”khaki” bindings, with no indication of what the original dust jacket looked like. If anything, this seems like it might be more confusing to the user.

Something that seemed so “obviously necessary” in a modern opac 12 months ago now seems pretty frivolous and would just add unneeded clutter to what will probably already be a fairly cluttery interface.

I’m sure this design will continue evolving, but it’s got to start somewhere.

I am a total sucker for a well crafted pop song.

This might come as a bit of a surprise to anyone that is familiar with my standard listening fare, but this secret obsession is nothing new. Let me clarify: when I say “pop”, I am not talking about the bubblegum pablum and effluvium that the industry tries to pass as music, but genuinely original, thoughtful and well-created songcraft that appeals to me as both a musician and a human being.

Enter the Shins. There is arguably no other act right now that is producing such catchy and hook-laden music. It’s not all necessarily upbeat, but it’s all pop. It also has the unique attribute of being something that Selena and I both really like.

Selena bought us tickets to their show last night at the Variety Playhouse. The Variety is definitely one of the better venues in town and I had been looking forward to the show.

I need to go on a sidebar here before I continue: I am a misanthrope. In general, I abhor other people (at least in groups) and find myself dreading to go to events with large numbers of people because I feel those people cannot be trusted to behave. Since I realize I am in the minority here, I generally just opt to avoid situations where I’ll get agitated by the behavior of others. For example, Selena and I have never been to a movie together. We both have had enough aggravating experiences in movie theaters that we feel it’s just in our best interest to wait until the movie comes out on DVD.

This being said, I do like to go to shows. However, given my general musical tastes, majority of the shows I go to are populated by a fairly homogenous, docile, and, in many cases, stoned crowd. That’s my “base” and we’ll call “comfort zone”.

Poppier music pushes me out of that safety net into the more dirty masses and I tend to get a little tweaked and annoyed by the behaviors of those around me.

So, back to the story. The opening act was the Brunettes and we can just say that the less I have to deal with them the better. They are a New Zealand band that reminds me of the Partridge Family and for their last song (or one of their last songs… I lost track) they all donned “Olsen twins” masks and played their instruments. It was like musical Carrot Top and I was happy when their set ended.

The crowd consisted of a lot of frat boys and their girlfriends/wives. There were quite a few visors worn. I am not much of a fan of those who wear visors. At one point, I leaned over to Selena and explained that by playing the music we do, my band would never attract a crowd and, as a pleasant side-effect, would therefore certainly never attract this crowd. Selena wasn’t really buying it, though. She still just thinks my music sucks.

The Shins were quite good. They had a lot of energy, their songs were tight. My… complaint… if you can call it this… is that I felt like they acted like they were playing at a frat house (and it seemed obvious that they had experience doing so).

Maybe I should stop now… The Shins are a very good band and if you don’t get hung up on the crowd, you’ll probably enjoy them live.

In the last three weeks, I have seen Band of Horses (or, more commonly, just “Horses”) twice. They opened for Iron & Wine at the Variety a couple of weeks ago, and I caught them again last week at the EARL opening for the Mountain Goats. It’s not often that I am blown away by an opening act, but Horses was pretty amazing. There is a bias here, Ben Bridwell is the younger brother of Mike Bridwell, who is a close friend and, until last December, neighbor. I had seen and enjoyed Ben’s previous band, Carissa’s Wierd, but Horses is much better. Their sound definitely has some roots in Crazy Horse, but there’s a Pac-NW sound in there, too. There’s some old Modest Mouse and a lot of Black Heart Procession and it’s just good.

Iron & Wine, of course, is great as well. Again, there’s bias. I&W’s drummer, Jonathan Bradley, also happens to be the drummer in my band. If you are familiar with Iron & Wine, your reaction might be “drummer?!?”, but, indeed, Sam Beam tours with a full band. Jonathan also plays “shaker” and other various wussy percussion on the albums. Sam has begun to rearrange some of his older songs to take advantage of the extra instrumentation, but sometimes it goes a bit far. “Bird Eating Bread” sounded like a Jimmy Buffett song. I sort of hope this is just Sam getting used to all the toys at his disposal.

A quick note on the crowds of these two shows: Iron & Wine’s was ok, but there was a bit too many of the “indie-rocker idolaters” of the variety that haunt “Low” and “Pedro the Lion” shows and stand in reverence and yell, “We love you” to the band.

Maybe because the headliners were the Mountain Goats, and it’s hard to imagine anyone shouting “we love you” to John Darnielle, the crowd at the EARL was much better. Ah, sweet, sweet EARL…

Well, it’s official. I am a published author. Granted, I didn’t do much; Dan wrote this paper almost singlehandedly, really. I put in a little more work than I did on this paper (this helped), although not much. Any of you who read my rather awkward white paper should immediately recognize that Dan is a much more inspired writer than I.

Still, I’m happy it’s out and I’m extremely thankful to have been given the opportunity to work with this group. I was way out of my league.

If the library blogosphere was your only source of current events within libraries, you would think that RSS was new MARC record and that podcasting will alleviate the need for circ rules.

This is ridiculous, of course, but that’s not to say that there isn’t merit to RSS (podcasting seems silly to me). RSS (in the right context) is perfect for libraries. Elsevier has just begun RSS feeds for current awareness searches (this has some problems, as well, but they are not insurmountable). RSS feeds for new acquisitions has potential, as well (although for larger libraries this needs to be filtered a bit… Emory, for example, gets 600 new items a week… put that in your Live Bookmarks, mofo). I know there are libraries that make RSS feeds of their news and announcements. This seems a little self-indulgent (how many people really subscribe to these?), but if they aren’t much extra work, why not? I have no stone to throw here, really, I have come up with “Wag the ‘Blog”, after all.

RSS’s real potential lies in computer-to-computer communication, though. All this talk of setting up feeds for our users is mostly noise to the primary goal which should be getting our services and collections visible in other sites and interfaces like A9’s OpenSearch. What we need right now is marketing and mindshare. Feeds of new items that have gone into the anthropology subject guide are nice and all, but it’d help a lot more if that feed appeared contextually off of a Google search or something.

Lorcan Dempsey makes note of the University of Michigan exporting their reserves lists via RSS to Sakai, their portal/courseware application. This is the perfect application of RSS and, I note, something I put into Reserves Direct almost 2 years ago. Granted, I didn’t think this was anything revolutionary or even noteworthy at the time, I just needed a way to get the reserves lists into Blackboard and this was a technology my feeble brain could wrap itself around. Actually, the RSS feed was never even advertised. Blackboard 5 has no native RSS capability (neither does Bb 6, for that matter… at least not in the course interface), I used a Perl CGI (now ported to PHP) to write the RSS feed as JavaScript in the page. This was a hack-y solution, but it worked, and that was what was necessary.

I guess what I’m drawn to here is the fact that the electronic reserves software that my employer has chosen to use doesn’t support RSS. In fact, there is no alternative to its own interface. At Emory, I was present at a demo for said program and I left thinking, “huh… we can do that…”. Two and a half to three years later, the commercial product still boasts the same feature set (which was indeed impressive — three years ago) but has not evolved a bit. In the same time (and primarily because Jason White took over the main programming duties when I left) Reserves Direct has become an extremely powerful and extraordinarily flexible tool for getting the collection and services to where the user would want it. Namely, contextually among their other course items.

How could our vendors be so out of touch to something so simple and obvious?

Maybe it’s the bachelor’s degree in a joke major from a football factory school talking here… but why must libraries constantly overthink themselves into obsolescence?

Why must the only search that brings back relevant data be an “exact search“? And, even then, why can’t that search include the leading article?

I realize metasearch isn’t the solution to every problem. But it would solve a vast majority of them. And then I look at A9’s OpenSearch and I think, “Jesus Christ, what are these momos in the NISO committee doing?”

That’s, of course, not fair. OpenSearch will be nowhere near as sophisticated or as robust as NISO Metasearch. And that is, of course, exactly why it will exist everywhere but libraries and NISO Metasearch will exist nowhere but libraries.

Don’t get me wrong. I love and embrace the rigidity of the MARC record. That being said, I want both authorities and friendly, loose and sloppy interfaces. I want Voyager and Amazon. I want Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar. And I want to be able to move around between simple and complex interfaces at will.

And as a developer, I want RSS and SRU, not OpenURL 1.0 and Z39.50. I like MODS. Hell, I like Dublin Core. I also like knowing that a good MARC record is living behind it.

Why can’t libraries cater to the information semi-literate once and a while?

Art Rhyno, Eric Lease Morgan and Jeremy Frumkin and I.

Dan Chudnov, Roy Tennant and I.

Todd Holbrook, Calvin Mah, John Durno and Mark Jordan put up with the ‘Murrican Ass that I am.

William Wueppelman put up with that, too.

Jason White, Aaron Krowne, Will Young and I used to go for “free beer” at the Dogwood Brewery (R.I.P).

Bernardo Gomez.

Nathan & Michelle Robertson were good enough to let my drunk ass into their home.

Emily Patrick was, as well.

David Atkins (Pasquale), Cat Cochrane (Honda Civic Wagon thingy), Teresa Braden (apartment, among other places)… Anne Langley (Petron, wedding).

Megan Adams, you and your LSU ilk put up with the worst of my liver in New Orleans. Chicago, as well. No ilk there, though.

Ah, sweet beer. You, friend, are a uniter, not a divider. Maybe W should learn a thing or two from you.

Maybe it’s the beer talking.

So, we launched the WAGger on Wednesday afternoon… sort of. We created a couple of pages for it, and linked to it from a couple of places. A “soft launch”, as they say. Still, it was a launch, nevertheless, so we needed to tell our public services librarians about it. We held a brownbag on Thursday at lunch to explain the fact that it was launched (soft launched) to help public services with the implementation.

Here’s where the irony comes in. jake was down. But since jake runs on tomcat, it was still “alive”, it just wasn’t returning connections. So, despite my praise from the other day, jake wasn’t allowing the WAGger to continue to SFX to display holdings.

Thankfully, the audience seemed to blow this off.

In the near future, expect to see a jake mirror at Georgia Tech.

–Art Rhyno

Dan says jake could no longer be updated because of the heavy costs of maintenance.

Todd (or, rather, Mark) says CUFTS can no longer be free because of the heavy costs of maintenance.

They are both (all three of them) right, and it’s incredibly sad. Knowledgebases are expensive to maintain.

I use both of these programs in WAG the Dog, despite the fact that I have access to SFX and make heavy use of the SFX API. jake is used in multiple places, and, regardless of the fact that the data has not been updated in years, is invaluable to the project. Before I bog down the SFX API with requests about an object that I know little about, I query jake to see if it is even a journal of some sort. Granted, exact title searches (especially on abbreviated titles) doesn’t really exist in jake, and no journal that has been created in the last couple of years would be included (something I definitely need to address), but it filters out a lot of noise… especially from Google Scholar. Today I realized the value of jake for WAGnet, the resource advisement piece of WAG the Dog. jake is able to find a lot of things (albeit fuzzily) that SFX just isn’t able to.

CUFTS is a really nice link resolver. Since SFU (or COPPUL, I’m not sure of the dynamics) has decided to charge for the knowledgebase (something I completely sympathize with), I have exported our live target data from SFX and imported it into CUFTS. Since I’m more interested in using CUFTS for an electronic holdings database rather than a link resolver, all of the links are OpenURLS pointing back to SFX. The nice part of CUFTS, is that it gives me a link to the database level as well as the journal and article level. When it comes to resource advisement, this is great. I can query CUFTS for a particular ISSN, find the database it resides in, and present a link saying, “hey, this journal you found appears in XYZ Academic. You might find more related things by searching there”.

The sad part about CUFTS moving to a subscription model is that I don’t have access to the A&I holdings information of a particular database. Yes, this data is in the SFX kb, but our e-resources team isn’t going to activate the “getAbstract” service in SFX. Without that, I am not sure I can export it. This would be a great boon for WAGnet, but at the moment I have no clue how to tap this potential.

So, instead, I have to work with old data from jake and figure out ways to link jake’s database names to our own.

Watch the maintenance costs increase.