Interesting news on HORIZON-L from COSUGI chair Chris Hauser. SirsiDynix are resurrecting the Horizon Enhancement database, where the user groups can feed into development priorities for Horizon. So it's not dead yet... and this comes on the back of some discussion that SD are definitely not saying that Horizon is EOL. One wag commented that he wished SirsiDynix killed Horizon a decade ago considering that since Horizon 8 was dumped there's been more development of Horizon then ever before....
And, coincidentally, Marshall Breeding's Perceptions 2009 survey of library automation has been released. Oddly it shows that Horizon customers are more satisfied with SirsiDynix than Unicorn/Symphony customers. Weird.
As always with Marshall's survey the free text comments are very interesting. I found myself nodding in agreement with one Horizon user's remark about not being impressed with what was currently available in the ILMS market and that they were happy to sit with Horizon and look at other methods of presenting their collections while waiting for what the future brought for both print and electronic collection management. Then I suddenly realised I could well be reading my own comment!
Monday, January 25, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
Summon @ JCU or something else?
A lot has been going on behind the scenes with our Summon implementation. Serials Solutions report we are on track for a mid-February release.
Through the discussion list I've made contact with two other Horizon using 'Summoners', Dave Pattern at Hudddersfield and Emily Lynema from North Carolina State, whose brains I'm hoping to mercilessly pick in developing a regime of extracting deletions, additions and changes to Horizon records to update Summon.
As I've done all I can until SS get back to us with something to tweak the only outstanding task is naming the service. It's been briefly discussed at Library Management Committee.
So what are our options?
As a working title I've gone with One Search because Serials Solutions need to stick something in place of 'name' and it's easily changed.
In the workroom we've had a couple of brainstorming sessions with an emphasis on silliness, the results included:
Through the discussion list I've made contact with two other Horizon using 'Summoners', Dave Pattern at Hudddersfield and Emily Lynema from North Carolina State, whose brains I'm hoping to mercilessly pick in developing a regime of extracting deletions, additions and changes to Horizon records to update Summon.
As I've done all I can until SS get back to us with something to tweak the only outstanding task is naming the service. It's been briefly discussed at Library Management Committee.
So what are our options?
- Call it Summon (my quick hunt of launched Summon sites shows about 80% of institutions have done this) .
Pro: people moving between institutions will know what it is.
Con: To the uninitiated Summon doesn't mean anything (but neither did Google) - Call it X Search (the name we currently have for our federated search tool)
Pro: institutional continuity.
Con: Meaningless to new members of our community - Call it something else.
Pro: we could choose something self-explanatory.
Con: What?
As a working title I've gone with One Search because Serials Solutions need to stick something in place of 'name' and it's easily changed.
In the workroom we've had a couple of brainstorming sessions with an emphasis on silliness, the results included:
- JCUgle (pronounced J Koogle)
- Thing that you must search if you dont want to fail
- Get a HD
- Spare Brain
- Better Than Google
- Everything@JCU
- Anything prefixed by a lower case letter (I'm over iThis, eThat, mTheother, xAnything)
- Joined up words with mixed case (they are so NinetiesSpeak)
- Trendy words and catchphrases (they don't stay fully sick for long, dude)
- Brevity
- Meaning
Break, what break?
Outside of work, many people say to me 'Things must be quiet at work, with the students away'. Wrong. For many library staff it's the time when they have to catch up on all the projects they identified during the year that they couldn't spend time on because they're spending time helping students and liasing with faculties. For example the liaison librarians have been powering through the creation of liguides to replace the old subject guides.
For me it's the time of year we're I can do major system changes with a much reduced chance of inconveniencing large numbers of clients.
One project was to incorporate ezproxy prefixes on all the subscription resources listed in our electronic reserve collection which we hope will significantly reduce the numbers of off site users having access issues. When we first implemented ezproxy we adopted a model whereby we expected users to engage ezproxy before looking for resources. In response to the 2007 client survey we have been systematically embedding the ezproxy route to resources so that the client no longer has to think about engaging ezproxy.
Part of that process was virtualising ezproxy to ensure stability, previously it had lived on an old PC in ITR.
We've built it into our ejournal portal, federated search and link resolver, as well as our database listings, libguides and the hyperlinks in our catalogue. With the conversion of Reserve Online I believe we have plugged the last hole through which off site students can be trapped by being outside our domain - the links to Reserve Online embedded in LearnJCU (our LMS; Blackboard). Using the ezproxy building block for Blackboard has the added advantage automatically authenticating to ezproxy so that user logged into Blackboard is no longer confronted with the authentication screen for ezproxy.
We could now consider removing the 'Remote Access' button from it's prominence on our home page.
Not to say that we are never going to have a remote access issue again. Some problems we are aware of:
For me it's the time of year we're I can do major system changes with a much reduced chance of inconveniencing large numbers of clients.
One project was to incorporate ezproxy prefixes on all the subscription resources listed in our electronic reserve collection which we hope will significantly reduce the numbers of off site users having access issues. When we first implemented ezproxy we adopted a model whereby we expected users to engage ezproxy before looking for resources. In response to the 2007 client survey we have been systematically embedding the ezproxy route to resources so that the client no longer has to think about engaging ezproxy.
Part of that process was virtualising ezproxy to ensure stability, previously it had lived on an old PC in ITR.
We've built it into our ejournal portal, federated search and link resolver, as well as our database listings, libguides and the hyperlinks in our catalogue. With the conversion of Reserve Online I believe we have plugged the last hole through which off site students can be trapped by being outside our domain - the links to Reserve Online embedded in LearnJCU (our LMS; Blackboard). Using the ezproxy building block for Blackboard has the added advantage automatically authenticating to ezproxy so that user logged into Blackboard is no longer confronted with the authentication screen for ezproxy.
We could now consider removing the 'Remote Access' button from it's prominence on our home page.
Not to say that we are never going to have a remote access issue again. Some problems we are aware of:
- Emailed Table Of Contents services bypass ezproxy causing problems for users
- Some local network environments, particularly in workplaces, have network restrictions that prevent ezproxy access
- Odd combinations of user environments and ISPs have caused problems that we haven't been able to diagnose, not least because they seem intermittent
- Some sites use javascript to create hyperlinks and ezproxy can't convert these to 'hold' the ezproxy session with them
- People on campus email links to people who are off campus expecting them to work
Friday, December 18, 2009
JCU is being Summon'd
It's official, we've signed up for Summon and I'm really looking forward to the end product, if not the work that has to be done to get there.
I quite proud that a smallish regional university library like ours has seen the potential of the product even in it's early days, and this is one of those rare times where the benefits have made early adoption the right choice.
I found this small blogpost today from Jonathan Miller the director of Olin Library and it filled my heart with good cheer heading into the festive season, and I quote:
"Half way through the meeting a professor says, "By the way, that R-Search is great. My students love it. I love it!"
This doesn't often happen with other library services ...."
I quite proud that a smallish regional university library like ours has seen the potential of the product even in it's early days, and this is one of those rare times where the benefits have made early adoption the right choice.
I found this small blogpost today from Jonathan Miller the director of Olin Library and it filled my heart with good cheer heading into the festive season, and I quote:
"Half way through the meeting a professor says, "By the way, that R-Search is great. My students love it. I love it!"
This doesn't often happen with other library services ...."
Friday, October 16, 2009
Discovery layers article
From the Chronicle of Higher Education 'After Losing Users in Catalogs, Libraries Find Better Search Software' an overview of 'the problem with catalogues' - and Summon gets a mention eventually.
Great quote from the article:
"a graduate student specializing in early American history, once had such a hard time finding materials that she titled a bibliography "Meager Fruits of an Ongoing Fight With Virgo [the U of Virginia's catalogue]."
Great quote from the article:
"a graduate student specializing in early American history, once had such a hard time finding materials that she titled a bibliography "Meager Fruits of an Ongoing Fight With Virgo [the U of Virginia's catalogue]."
Monday, October 5, 2009
Summon to replace X Seach?
First up apologies for the lack of posts lately - I've been busy reading a book about improving your blog 
Because I have more formal ways of telling you what's happening I'm going to concentrate on using this blog on scanning the horizon for those who want to see what might be coming over the hill and on things that are making me ponder in a brave attempt to get you to ponder with me too.
Currently I'm looking at Summon, the latest offering from Serials Solutions. I urge you to look at it on the early adopter sites and tell me if it excites you as much as it excites me:
It is not a federated search engine like X Search (360 Search). It does not translate your search into other formats and submit them to lots of search engines, then wait for the all the results to come back and process them and display them to you. Because it has it's own index it's quick (almost Google quick). You search it like Google too: one search box, and the same syntax for phrases, ANDs and NOTs.
All that is cool enough but don't forget what it's searching. Everything* you've got. Regardless of format or location. In one search. No more 'why can't I search for articles in the catalogue?' or 'what's the difference between Proquest 5000 and Expanded Academic Index?' No more scrolling through hundreds of databases with meaningless titles (ASABE Technical Library, Project Muse) wondering which one will return anything.
And that's only point one. I will circulate my proposal/information document to the Library Management Committee and through that forum to anyone interested. Please try it out on at least one of the example sites (you can do everything except view subscription content without logging in - yet another cool addition the list of why Summon is grabbing my attention.
Watch the promotional video
*Ok not quite everything, to search subscription eresources SS negotiates licensing agreements with publishers, and while they have literally hundreds of these agreements, with major publishers, and they are growing, there are some titles not yet included.
Because I have more formal ways of telling you what's happening I'm going to concentrate on using this blog on scanning the horizon for those who want to see what might be coming over the hill and on things that are making me ponder in a brave attempt to get you to ponder with me too.
Currently I'm looking at Summon, the latest offering from Serials Solutions. I urge you to look at it on the early adopter sites and tell me if it excites you as much as it excites me:
- http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/home/find/summon/
- http://www.library.unisa.edu.au/
- http://www.liv.ac.uk/library/e-library/summon.html
- http://www.gvsu.edu/library/
It is not a federated search engine like X Search (360 Search). It does not translate your search into other formats and submit them to lots of search engines, then wait for the all the results to come back and process them and display them to you. Because it has it's own index it's quick (almost Google quick). You search it like Google too: one search box, and the same syntax for phrases, ANDs and NOTs.
All that is cool enough but don't forget what it's searching. Everything* you've got. Regardless of format or location. In one search. No more 'why can't I search for articles in the catalogue?' or 'what's the difference between Proquest 5000 and Expanded Academic Index?' No more scrolling through hundreds of databases with meaningless titles (ASABE Technical Library, Project Muse) wondering which one will return anything.
And that's only point one. I will circulate my proposal/information document to the Library Management Committee and through that forum to anyone interested. Please try it out on at least one of the example sites (you can do everything except view subscription content without logging in - yet another cool addition the list of why Summon is grabbing my attention.
Watch the promotional video
*Ok not quite everything, to search subscription eresources SS negotiates licensing agreements with publishers, and while they have literally hundreds of these agreements, with major publishers, and they are growing, there are some titles not yet included.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Jakob Nielsen says "Stop Password Masking"
Usability advocate Jakob Neilsen's latest Alertbox recommends that you "Stop Password Masking" when creating systems that require passwords.
The Summary:
Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn't even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.
Jakob's stuff is always food for thought, and it's hard to argue with his points about feedback, but in an education or library environment I can't imagine it would be a good thing. Simple situations, like showing a web application in a training room would be like broadcasting your login details without some fancy dataprojector footwork, especially in our environment where we are the antithesis of single sign on.
He suggests that for situations like the one above there be a checkbox offering to mask the password, which I think would decrease usability with clutter.
His call to abandon legacy design is, to me, a case of carefully chosen words to slant meaning. If he had of said abandon convention it would have been much less convincing. Masked passwords aren't just a web thing, ATMs and EFTPOS use them, as have computers since before ARPANET.
We do have students who get their passwords wrong, and with increasingly stringent rules about passwords containg upper and lower case, punctuation, numeric characters, this isn't going to get better unless we change our whole approach to authentication.
One option is card readers with PINs. Many government departments use this method (one I know of allows staff to travel to any other office in the country, place their card in the reader of any computer, enter their PIN and they get their Window profile AND their phone number.
If banks (and customers) think the Card/PIN method is secure enough for financial transactions that suggests it's secure enough for our needs.
The Summary:
Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn't even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.
Jakob's stuff is always food for thought, and it's hard to argue with his points about feedback, but in an education or library environment I can't imagine it would be a good thing. Simple situations, like showing a web application in a training room would be like broadcasting your login details without some fancy dataprojector footwork, especially in our environment where we are the antithesis of single sign on.
He suggests that for situations like the one above there be a checkbox offering to mask the password, which I think would decrease usability with clutter.
His call to abandon legacy design is, to me, a case of carefully chosen words to slant meaning. If he had of said abandon convention it would have been much less convincing. Masked passwords aren't just a web thing, ATMs and EFTPOS use them, as have computers since before ARPANET.
We do have students who get their passwords wrong, and with increasingly stringent rules about passwords containg upper and lower case, punctuation, numeric characters, this isn't going to get better unless we change our whole approach to authentication.
One option is card readers with PINs. Many government departments use this method (one I know of allows staff to travel to any other office in the country, place their card in the reader of any computer, enter their PIN and they get their Window profile AND their phone number.
If banks (and customers) think the Card/PIN method is secure enough for financial transactions that suggests it's secure enough for our needs.
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