It’s a Library Thing..

A little ATCQ reference…Tim Spalding has just begun talking about some of the social information content within Library Thing…They even make room for user-submitted covers…Tim Spalding’s Author Gallery. All publicly available or permission granted. Spalding views Library Thing as a wikipedia like catalog—all user generated content can be changed by users — and thinks within five years we’ll see an open source catalog alternative to OCLC.

Money money money money..!

IMLS has awarded Annette and Godmar a National Leadership Grant to support the development of LibX over the next two years….They will be making an Edition builder interface so that libraries can build their own editions. Check this…Virginia Tech is still only using IE. Annette & Godmar plan to build a plug-in for IE..They will also be looking at usability with this grant…

Godmar Back

Godmar is discussing the functionality of the LibX plugin and OpenURL technology…applause when he dragged the title of an article from a bibiliography on a pdf document to Google Scholar and the window opened up to the new source.  Discussing “cues” now…

Go forth and embed…

I’m at our NEASIST program today…SOLD OUT!! Annette Bailey is up now talking about LibX. LibX actually came about when she was interviewing for jobs last year. Bailey wanted to have something cool and useful to wow prospective employers. Annette and Godmar’s initial conversations included the LibX tool’s potential as a “virtual librarian.” She did this for an INTERVIEW…Follow today’s discussion here or on NEASIST’s event blog.

A Camping We Will Go…

Library Camp East is underway…Lichen is keeping us in the know on her very prettyful blog. I wish I could hear Casey Bisson’s OPAC discussion. He’s my Innovative hero…I know, it’s too early in the week for puns. My consortium upgraded to III’s WebOpac version over the summer and I am on a task force that will recommend improvements to the interface to enhance its function. The OPAC is the public face to the library, not an earth-shattering statement, but sometimes its importance gets passed over in favor of discussions about federated search and hot databases. I’m the lone nondeveloper on the force. I have html and various scripting experience, but it’s not like I play with java/perl on a daily basis. I hope my role will be to keep the OPAC user-centric.

Fall ramblings

It feels very silly firing off an “I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaack” post, since I’ve been “gone” for a long time and even I managed to forget about the blog I started in earnest last March. But what’s a blog/journal for if you can’t post a mea culpa every now and again? I think I’ll make this my pre-mea culpa. Blog technology is sooo forgiving. I’m writing while on a dinner break and I’ll save you my what-I-did-last-spring/summer rant, except to say I’ve learned to fence and this summer I rediscovered my love for pre-dawn rowing. It is week three into the fall semester, and it’s starting to slow down just a tad. The meetings however, are still coming fast and furiously…that is one thing they DON’T tell you about in L-school. You learn very quickly how much you should/can take on. As they say, what doesn’t kill you…. (more…)

The OPAC is your friend

I survived the first session of a two-part workshop on LC subject analysis and headings. I say this very light-heartedly. My first experience working in a library involved migrating a special collection at Harvard from Dewey to LC and automating that collection (using a small commercial ASP) really helped to inform my searching both as a user and a Reference Librarian. It’s turning out to be a very nice refresher (although I can live without knowing what all those OCLC fixed fields do) and the subject analysis part is really cool when I think about navigating through my consortium’s growing catalog. I hope to have some serious searching-within-subject-heading chops when this is over.

Reference desk fun revisited

Had an interesting question this week: A student taking a Modern Murder Mystery course taught here is writing a 10 page paper on how adults view child witnesses as depicted in the John Grisham’s The Client. I’m vaguely familiar with the movie. I’m sure I said something along the lines of “I remember that it was a bad movie” when the student asked me if I’d seen it. Oops. Library humor. I briefly gave Mr. Grisham the time of day when he took over the Oxford American, but I really can’t stomach his commercial work. (more…)

Back to the basics: LC Red Books

A transformer (perhaps more than one) blew on my campus last Tueday and the college closed for one full day, and was without an internet connection for another full day. Remember what life was like before the Internet and WebOPACs? Well, I did for a split second. A student came in looking for a book on writing business surveys. After a quick check in the Reference section, I pulled the Strauss book and the HBS Library’s core collection book to identify titles. Unarmed with a card catalog, I grabbed the LC Subject Heading Red Books to help me locate any useful books in the circulating collection. Information source books like Strauss and HBS Core don’t typically have call numbers, but a book like HBS may tell you if something circulates or not. (more…)

Unsuccessful Reference Transaction?

What can happen when you can’t figure out where/how a patron found an item…….

Me: Hi! How can I help you?

Patron: I need help finding some books and journals but I’ve never done this before (hands me a handwritten list of titles with call nos. and another list of titles, not clear if these are books or not)

Me: Oh, looks like you have the call nos. already…..(give a brief explanation of how to find them. We’ve gone through half a renovation, it’s confusing and our until very recent lack of signage doesn’t help).

On to the second list. The patron has carefully written down titles, a few last names and what look like volume and issue numbers.

Me: Okay, it looks like you are looking for sociology journals. Some of these are pretty old (early 70′s), you will have to do a little traveling in the library today. (my attempt at humor b/c again, due to the renovation, journals are in 3 different places). We’ll save the fun article available only on microfilm until the end. Patron laughs politely.

(A few of these I just can’t seem to find….)

Me: Did you say you found these in the catalog? (at this point, I’ve tried the catalog, the social science dbases and the Serials Directory. nada)

Patron: Yes I found them by doing a keyword search in HELIN (our library catalog), I’m not really sure…

Okay, I’ll stop here before it gets any more painful. The patron clearly knew more than she thought, but sometimes it can be really tricky to get those clues out of them. When it’s clear to me that I probably only have half (or less) of the info I need to answer a question, I sometimes try to retrace the patron’s steps (in true Encylopedia Brown fashion), keep asking increasingly probing questions until I find what they’re looking for. I think she was probably 85 percent satisified, but what’s bugging me, is why can’t our students differentiate between the catalog and our databases? How do we fix that issue? What’s not getting through?

New Walford Out in June

Listen up reference geeks! If you love the hunt like I do, you will be happy to know that the first volume (3 volumes over 3 years) of the New Walford’s Guide to Reference Resources will be out in June [Peter Scott's Blog]. It wasn’t until I took my second reference course (Lit. of the Humanities) that I really got to go deep into the reference stacks. So much fun. My own personal collection is experiencing some rebirth with my move to Providence, I hope to pick up some titles I’ve been lusting after soon. Speaking of fun, a grad student stopped at the reference desk last night in search of a proper definition of the “dictator novel”. We looked in all of the usual places (Eng. Lit. encyclopedias, literary handbooks, specialized dictionaries, a few databases, Google, etc.) I found a discussion of the genre in an article in LION, but it was solely in reference to dictators in Latin America. The student was looking for a definition that was more general; apparently this is a growing genre on the African continent as well. I think she was “satisficed” but of course, this one will bug me for a while longer. The dictator novel has been around at least since the seventies, there has to be something out there somewhere..