Summon beta soft launched at JCU

We soft-launched Summon, branded as One Search, late last week. Still poring over issues and reporting them to Serials Solutions, and learning a lot more about the product than we did, and scratching our heads about other things.

At the user group post-VALA a lot of other institutions reported resistance from liaison librarians, something I haven't had to deal with here, although some are quick to point out failings I don't see that as a bad thing, you can't address issues you're not away of. One reaction that I think could be wrongly interpreted as resistance, is the realisation that Summon is not universal in anything it does and is not meant to be the be all and end all of advanced research (at least not yet). I see it as a big step towards getting new researchers over the hump of where and how to start searching, and not a bad way of getting an overview of what's available in a subject area (the way some academics use Google). For more focused advanced research that requires comprehensiveness there are other tools, but by the time you need them hopefully you more comfortable with search and retrieval and have a relationship with your liaison librarian.

Each question I send to the client center opens my eyes a little more and reminds me of the 'cultural' differences between Ex Libris and Serials Solutions (sort of like McDonalds vs Burger King) I reported on back when reviewing our AARLIN participation. EL were a lot more open, focussed on client contribution and consensus, reporting issues widely, SS keep that sort of communication narrow channel between you and them. Both are responsive and there are pluses to both models and SS are widening those channels with reps responding on mailing lists which is good to see.

Things I've learned:

• Summon doesn't use Ulrich's to identify peer-reviewed journals (yet), so using that filter will exclude some journals that are peer-reviewed.
• If Summon doesn't get a response in 4 seconds from your catalogue it will have a link to the catalogue labelled 'Check availability' rather than the branch and loan status.
• Records disappear and come back again, I imagine because of re-ingestion of existing records
• Our library news item announcing it only inspired two pieces of feedback, clearly marketing is our next hurdle

I'm getting positive secondhand feedback from the liaison librarians in Cairns, so I live in hope. And SS are currently ingesting our institutional repository records (ResearchOnline@JCU).

Still quiet on the discovery layer front!

Access 2007 and network shares

Simplest of tips - if you've recently had Access upgraded to 2007 and try and open a database on a network share with macros you get a bunch of security prompts. Rather than go through the process of allowing them each time.

Click on the office logo
Click on Access Options
Click on Trust Center
Click on Trust Center Settings
Click on Trusted Locations
Tick the box next to Allow Trusted Locations on my Network (not recommended)
Click on Add New Locations
Select drive (directory optional as is the 'include subfolders' tick box
OK your way out of there!

This came up because our HDMS databases are on a network share

Twitter augmented Panel Discussion Day 3 Morning Plenary

This morning's panel was decidedly more wide roaming than yesterdays. With the chair tapping into the zeitgeist via Twitter. Lots of talk about user demand for multimedia and a brave attempt to relate what digital natives wanted/preferred.

One tweep said that her/his children searched for things in this order:
Youtube
Google Images
Google

Lots of real and virtual chat about access to ebooks in Australia and New Zealand and a little handwringing from the public library sector. Rights, metadata, full text and the near death of indexing and abstracting services unless they can be one-click to full text.

Teula Morgan pulled the blanket off the elephant in the room when she asked do libraries even needed to be involved if people were getting what they needed without our interference. No-one seemed willing to answer.

All in all a pretty interesting session, and confirming that itch in the back of my brain that sometimes libraries are a solution looking for a problem.

Day 2 arvo: APIs, eResearch and the Twitter vs Tagging discussion

Paul Bonnington from Monash did an overview of the explosion in data collected, collated, and visualised using automated methods, and some of the lessons he'd learned while trying to preserve that data for wider use than the original purpose of the research. Organisationally the area he works for sits at the nexus between IT, Library, Research Office and Academics and he underlined the importance of partnerships, you can't do this on your own.

He stressed that a sense of ownership of the data by the researchers was crucial to its preservation, and the importance putting the data archiving tool in place at the time of collection.

He cited a couple key articles and books but I was only quick enough to jot down The Fourth Paradigm http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/ for a tweet, and I can't find his presentation online or on the CD yet.

As interesting as this area is I don't think it's going to be our direct responsibility to carry out the ANDS mission at JCU although we will have a role in supporting it and linking the data to the publications in our institutional repository that result from it.

Roy Tennant roller skated at a rapid pace over the possibilities of APIs to vastly improve services by augmenting them with information from disparate resources and he offered a feast of links to lists of APIs and real world examples. Between this and the Linked Data stuff I'm starting to think I should start removing myself from the operational tasks that currently eat up so much of my time, and doing more of the 'cool stuff' that Heather envisioned when she first created the job of 'library technologies coordinator'. Sigh. Anyway for my future reference here are two of Roys links to lists of APIs:
http://techessence.info/apis/
http://www.programmableweb.com/apis

We really need more librarians with these sort of skills because I think it's difficult to see the possibilities if you're not getting your hands dirty looking at this stuff. That said, to badly misquote Jacques Attali from memory 'We tend to do what the technology allows us to do, rather than developing the technology that allows us to do what we actually want'.

And I lost my Twitter virginity today. (If your a tweep search for the #VALA2010 tag or post VALA I'm @cockerilla). I mention this because the final session was Top Trends with a star studded panel that included, but was not limited to, Roy Tennant, Marshall Breeding, Tom Tague and Karen Calhoun.

This Geek & Poke cartoon appears courtesy of a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 License.

There was lively discussion, but the only 'trend' discussed was social tagging and whether libraries (and other cultural institutions) wanted to control, censor, or normalise it and if so to what extent and how.
In the land of Tweet the natives (and there were lots) were simmering about how the discussion was getting bogged down in the minutae of just one trend. I finally saw a use for Twitter - how would the discussion have evolved if the feed was displayed to the room, or even just to the panel or chair?
Apparently the VALA organisers wanted to display the feed but the venue couldn't do it. I'm not sure whether that sort of immediate, but quiet, feedback to a panel from the audience would improve this sort of event, and whether the feed would become the centre of attention rather than the speaker, but I'm kind of interested in finding out. No doubt chaos might regularly be the result until protocols evolved to make it workable. I can't help thinking that it might end up looking like 'The Word' from the Colbert Report, where the commentator says one thing while the text and graphics provide humorous counterpoint.

Marshall Breeding at VALA2010

Marshall covered a lot of ground. Some of the bits that stood out for me were:

• The Abby video that introduced VALA2010 could have replaced his presentation
• Web 2.0 is old hat, it should be part of the core of our apps not an add on
• We can't be device nazis - and discriminate against users with various devices (iPhones, iPads et al)
• Kuali OLE, Ex Libris URM, WorldCat cloud LMS are the revolutionaries in LMS's (as opposed to the evolutionaries
• Do you want to go open source if it's just replicating the functionality you have in your current system?
• APIs as an alternative to opening up proprietary systems
• Open Source tend to have more limited APIs than the proprietary ones
• Most library web sites are a list of links to disparate resources (as I say all the time but sometimes I wonder if anyone listens)
• Marshall's ideal looks a little like Summon...
• Deep indexing (particularly of book materials - Hathi Trust
• Mobile is coming, but have a unified approach there too
• Cloud computing is inevitable and efficient
• Economic restraint is not an excuse for slowing tech innovation, it's a reason to accelerate it
• Outlook for next five years
  
• most still using evolved systems
• more next gen LMS
• Resource discovery matures
• Mobile mainstreaming
  
• Transition from local to cloud

In response to a question from the floor said that the problem for Linked Data is the business case for IP owners to make content Linked Data (by definition freely accessible)

VALA 2010 on Twitter

Ok Twits, here it is:

http://twitter.com/search?q=%23vala2010

If you like that sort of thing

OpenCalais

I've seen so many articles about the semantic web it's a pleasure seeing someone actually doing it.

OpenCalais is a free (for under 50,000 requests/day) service analyses unstructured data and returns structured metadata, really, really quickly. And that metadata links to related 'packets' of 'Linked Data'. That's pretty meaningless without seeing it in action. But try pasting an article into http://viewer.opencalais.com/ and see how it breaks the data down into social tags, entities, people and events down the left hand side.
Sure it's a roughasgoodenough approach, but it still impressive, and has allowed many organisations to free up human resources and speed up throughput (and improve accuracy) when processing large wads of information. Or you could simple use it to add tags to you blog posts...

As Tom Tague says, "Match up a geek with a domain specialist and see what happens".

Tim Berners-Lee talks about Linkded Data on TED:


The following are just links and terms for me to follow up on when I have time but...

http://opencalais.com/
http://viewer.opencalais.com/
OpenCalais Marmoset
OpenCalais Tagaroo
http://semanticproxy.com/
Linked Data W3C standard http://linkeddata.org/
OpenPublish (based on Drupal) http://www.opensourceopenminds.com/openpublish
Powerhouse Museum (kEMU, REST API,
OpenCalais Gallery of parsers