Drowning Not Waving

In my long list of things to look at more closely that I never find the time to is Google Wave.

A few QULOC-ICT members were playing with it but we lost steam.

If you have a Wave account and want a playmate I'm up for it. If you want a Wave account I've got 25 invites, just ask.

If I did find time I think I'd read Google Wave: Collaboration Reworked, Melissa L. Rethlefsen's article in Library Journal and I think I'd pay particular attention to these links she provides at the bottom:

• The Complete Guide to Google Wave


• Google Wave Samples Gallery


• Google Wave: You Need To Pay Attention to This


• How To Add Twitter to Google Wave


• 7 Things You Should Know About Google Wave


• What Problems Does Google Wave Solve?

Sun not setting on Horizon?

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!

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?

1. 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)
   
2. 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
   
3. Call it something else.
   Pro: we could choose something self-explanatory.
   Con: What?

I personally have reservations about naming things that have little or nothing to with the function or service the thing provided. I think every university catalogue should be called 'the catalogue', every intranet should be called 'the intranet'. But I fall down when I think of a meaningful name for 'federated searching' or 'discovery layer' or 'web scale discovery tool'.

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
  

As you can see I am desperate need of better suggestions! Marks will be deducted for:

• 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)

Bonus points for:

• Brevity
• Meaning

Please post your suggestions urgently!

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:

• 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

The workaround for most of these problems is part user education and part web programming. I've hacked together some javascript that takes a native URL and 'ezproxyfies' it, and we've been collecting examples of what other institutions do to come up with something we can provide to the JCU community to ensure their links work on and off campus - but just providing that tool isn't going to solve the problems unless clients are aware of why they are having the problem and that the tool will solve it.

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 ...."

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]."

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:

• 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/

Basically Summon is search engine & metadata harvester. Serials Solutions call it a 'web scale discovery tool' and in library tech talk it fits in the spectrum of 'Resource Discovery Layers'. Sluicing off the jargon it is like having a Google searching your library collections. All your collections: Catalogue, institutional repository (eprints) AND your subscription econtent.

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.