Reference Evaluation

Well my post on websites (8/23/06) has resulted in the most comments (both posted to the blog, sent to me in e-mail, and mentioned to me in person) so far and I think we will return to that issue a bit later. Rollins is closed today as hurricane, not wait, tropical storm, no wait, depression Ernesto trundles our way so I am getting some much needed time to work on my diss.

In the meantime, here is a presentation I made at the ALA Conference in New Orleans in June on reference evaluation. It is best viewed with a recent version of IE.

Ongoing evaluation and assessment of library services is only going to become more important as colleges like Rollins continue to think about how to maximize their investment in resources that help them fulfill their educational mission.

Let's talk about websites

Specifically college library websites. What do you like about the Olin Library's website and what do you not like? Are there sites out there that you really like? Not because of the content of the site or the library, but because of how you navigate through the site, what you can do at the site, and the look and feel of the site?

Here are a few that I think are worth looking at, for either good or ill.

Middlebury College. I like the cool photos, the white space, and the san serif script (I am a sucker for san serif.) I really like the integration of IT and the library, but that is a topic for a different post. I like the navigation route thingy (I forget the technical term) that shows you what route you took to get here and enables you to get home or to any intermediate page easily. I like the quick links on the right. But the whole page has too many links. It is overwhelming.

Oberlin College. This is a sorry excuse for a website. Overstuffed with a weird mixture of services etc. and buttons with mixed fonts on the left. But hold on, what is this? A new and very definitely improved website. Changing images, the cool news blog, san serif and white space (of course), the integration of the catalog into the website, the quick links drop down menu. Perhaps still too many links (news and newspapers? Dictionaries? Do they really belong on the opening page?) I also had to scroll down to see the whole page, but overall, a huge improvement.

Smith College. It is fussy on the left hand side, but I like the menus that appear when your mouse floats over the, mercifully few, choices in the middle of the page.

Gustavus Adolphus College. I don't like the color scheme, but I rather like the Mondrianesque arrangement and the spare three column menu arrangement. Another OPAC search feature integrated into the home page, I like that.

Bowdoin College. Notice how it is integrated into the College home page via the top frame. The tabs in the middle are an interesting solution to the volume of information libraries have to convey. As well as my preferred elements that I have talked to death earlier in this list, I like the way your eyes are drawn to the center of the page where the real business links of the library are laid out.

Look, there are lots more. None are perfect. I don't think any college library website can fully satisfy all the needs of its constituents, but some do a better job than others. Which ones would you recommend? For even more fun, tell me which ones are truly appalling and why.

The Book of Lost Books

I am reading Stuart Kelly's The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read and thoroughly enjoying it. I am afraid we do not have a copy in the Olin Library, but it is at the Winter Park Public Library, though checked out at the moment. It consists of many short chapters, each one about an author who wrote at least one work that is lost, no copies are known to exist, was never written, or not finished . It is fascinating, funny, heart breaking, and thought provoking.

You can imagine what a horribly delicious read this is for a librarian.

Opening Libraries to the World

If you look to your left you will see a new feature of this blog. I have added some code (beta by the way) that enables anyone to search the WorldCat database (which includes at this writing more than 67 million bibliographic records and 1 billion individual holdings in 9,000 libraries around the world, including the Olin Library.)

One of the issues librarians have struggled with over the past decade is how to make their collections as visible to web users as openly accessible websites. WorldCat on the web is one way to do this. It enables you to search for an author, title, or topic and the use a ZIP code to find out if local libraries have what you want. Of course, you still have to be bona fide user of an owning library to be able to borrow something, but you can even buy a title if you prefer.

One thing that I think we in the Olin Library have to consider doing is finding more ways to take the library's collections, services, and professionals to the user, rather than waiting for the user to come to us. This means proactively getting out of the physical library, but it also means being proactive and taking the library to our users online, on the web, in Blackboard, in Facebook, throughout the Rollins website, and anywhere else our users might be when they want to use the library or have, what we call in the trade, an information need.

All you need is something to search for and a ZIP code. Give it a go and tell me what you think.

The world is full of surprises. The big question is how you react to them.

The title of this post comes from an article on today's New York Times ( "Get Out of That Rut and Into the Shower" by William C. Taylor. Business section, New York Times, August 13, 2006. From Rollins, you can find it here.)

It is all about unusual ways to collect information on how customers use products and services. For instance a hedge fund that invests in banks etc. spends a day using bank branches throughout Manhattan and gets a very different view of customer service and operations than the one it hears from the head office. Or an industrial design firm that films people taking showers instead of just asking them about how they shower. Taylor's conclusion -- and my title -- is a quote from Jana Eggers.

At the Olin Library, we certainly need to find a variety of ways to assess and evaluate our services, facilities, and resources as we develop a plan for the future, but what really matters is how we react to what we learn.

Presentation to Rollins

During my interview I was asked to make a presentation and chose to talk about the Role of the College Library in the Age of the Universal Library. So I load it here in case anyone who was not able to attend is interested. It is best viewed with recent versions of Internet Explorer.

Planning

One of the things that struck me when I interviewed here and that has been reinforced by the contact I have had with the Olin Library and Rollins College since then, including my first day here, is that this is a well run library that has the support of the Rollins community.

There is no big crisis that I need to come in quickly and fix. (If you disagree, please let me know!)

What this library does need is a new strategic plan. The present plan is dated 2003 and much of it has either been successfully completed or superseded.

President Duncan was right when he was asked what his immediate plans were, ""My plan is to listen. I'll listen and ask questions ... and actually those are two very different things." A wise librarian once advised me on becoming a new director, if at all possible, to listen for the first year and really get to know the campus community.

Listening to students and faculty, as part of a thorough environmental scan, should be the first stage of an good strategic planning process. This can be done through general surveys like LibQual, through focus groups, and also through personal meetings, either individually or in groups.

There is a lot more to successful strategic planning and I hope to write about that soon, but in the meantime, expect to see a lot of such listening and questioning this year.

If you want to jump the gun and tell me what you think now, be my guest. Send me an e-mail or post a comment to this blog.

Arriving on campus

I arrived on the Rollins campus today after a long but uneventful trip from Pittsburgh. I don't have much time to write today, but I did want to note a few things I noticed on arriving here. No, not the heat. I think it has been hotter in Pittsburgh that here for the last few days!

Facilities and Campus Security staff helped me get settled in the Sutton Place Apartments. Despite being very busy with preparations for the begining of term everyone was unfailingly polite, helpful and friendly and I dealt with individuals with names -- Sharon, Phil, Duane, Ken, Kim, Laura. This is a huge difference from a place like Pitt, where you rarely get to know someone's name and only deal with offices, not individual people.

Another difference: no forms. I am sure there will be some, but so far I haven't had to fill in a form. Lovely.

Finally, the campus is as beautiful as I remember it.

Traveling to Orlando

I am going to be moving over the next few days so don't expect an entry until next week.

Congratulations to Yvonne Jones

Our own Yvonne Jones has just published her article "Oversized and underused: Size Matters in Academic Libraries" -- gotta love that title! -- in the July 2006 College & Research Libraries (you can find it here via Rollins.)

It is a useful study of how college libraries define and shelve oversized books, which are in my experience surprisingly vexing problems, and whether this impacts the overall level of use. She found that how the library handled these materials didn't make too much of a difference, probably because users are now often browsing and finding such books in the OPAC rather than by browsing the shelves.

College & Research Libraries is one of the top journals in academic librarianship, so congratulations to Yvonne.

Fred Kilgour 1914-2006

I learned that Fred Kilgour died yesterday. He was one of the great librarians of the 20th century. One of the first librarians to recognize how useful computing technologies could be to libraries, he founded a computerized system that enabled academic libraries in Ohio to share cataloging records called OCLC. Sharing online cataloging records meant that only one library had to originally catalog a book, all the others could simply link to that record and download the record to their own catalog. This was a huge saving in terms of labor. The system also improved how libraries found out what other libraries owned, and enabled libraries to borrow and lend those materials. This union catalog has grown into what we know today as WorldCat.

A great librarian; creative, effective, visionary. He will be sadly missed.

To Be Literate is to Possess the Cow of Plenty

I have loved the title of this post since I first picked up S.R. Ranganathan's "Five Laws of Library Science" back in library school in the early 90's. It is the motto of the Madras Library Association that first published Ranganathan's book back in 1931. A good image of it and the seal of the MLA has been scanned by a librarian at the Colorado College Tutt Library.

As a reference librarian, I am embarrassed to say that I am not sure what it means exactly or where the MLA found it (brownie points to the first reader who can provide the answer) but I am sure you get the point. My guess is it is another, far more poetic, way of saying knowledge is power (and I do know that is a derived from Francis Bacon's Meditationes Sacrae.)

Ranganathan was a remarkable man. A mathematician who became India's most famous and influential librarian. He promolgated his five laws in the context of a manual of library service. They are simple yet profound and I have found them to be important guideposts throughout my career.

Books are for use.
Every reader his or her book.
Every book its reader.
Save the time of the reader.
The Library is a growing organism.

The book (especially the 1931 edition) is now difficult to get hold of. I am afraid it is not in any local libraries and unavailable at any of the big online new and used book sellers. Copies are available in Florida State University and the State Library's collections. But I would wait for dLIST's digital version.

Take a look to the left.

I have some links to various online open access journals in the left hand bar and a few things caught my eye this evening.

The first is a whole issue of "First Monday" devoted to papers from their 2006 First Monday Conference on the Open Access (OA) movement. Open Access is already having a major impact upon scholarly communication, and therefore libraries, and this will only grow in the years ahead. Access that is free to the end user via the Internet has great potential for relatively small libraries like the Olin Library. These papers indicate that the potential of OA goes far beyond libraries and U.S. higher education.

The other is an article in the current issue of "Ariadne" on the history and future of search engines by Phil Bradley. His conclusions bring me straight back to a point I seem to never escape from: one role of the library, in partnership with the rest of the faculty, will be to help students understand and think critically about how these commercial search engines relate to the wider information environment and how individuals want to interact with these search engines.

Disaster Plans

As you might imagine, I have a growing list of things I need to find out about when I get the Olin Library. With hurricane season upon us and the library's beautiful location right next to a lake, one thing I am interested in finding out about is what kind of disaster plans exist on campus and in the library.

American Libraries Direct (a newsletter from the American Libraries Association) had a brief item today about D-plan, "a free online program to help institutions write comprehensive disaster plans. dPlan provides an easy-to-use template that allows museums, libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions of all sizes to develop a customized plan" from the Northeast Document Conservation Center.

Fire, flood, earthquakes, negligence, war, theft, pests, mold ... the list of things that can damage or destroy a library seems endless. Two books that give you a good sense of the impact of disaster on libraries and thus on the wider society (and perhaps more interestingly, the impact of societal collapse on libraries) are Matthew Battles' Library: An Unquiet History (not available in Olin unfortunately, but it is in the Winter Park Public Library at 027.009 Bat and in UCF Main Library General Collection at Z721 .B28 2003) and Lionel Casson's Libraries in the Ancient World (available in the Olin library General Collection at Z722.C37 2001)

No plan can cover every eventuality and, to paraphrase Moltke, no plan survives contact with reality. But a thorough disaster plan, that everyone who needs to know is aware of, can save you from a "world of pain", to quote another great strategic thinker.

Where will the next generation Web take libraries?

The OCLC newsletter "NextSpace" has published an interesting piece on how libraries might change with the next generation of Web development, called "Web 2.0: Where will it take libraries?"

Tom Storey overstates his case when he writes that with this next generation of web development, " the Web moves from simply being sites and search engines to a shared network space that drives work, research, education, entertainment and social activities—essentially everything people do." Of course he means everything we do online. Admittedly a big part of my work life and a considerable part of my life, but by no means everything.

Other contributors make thought provoking points though. Here are some quotes.

"We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning. Obviously, we’ll help and educate patrons when we can, and when they want us to, and the more we can integrate our services with local curricula, the better. But if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons. " Rick Anderson.

"This librarian bases all planning and proposals for services, materials and outreach on user needs and wants. User-centered libraries breakdown barriers and allow users access wherever they are: home, work, commuting, school, or at the library. This involves users from the get go in planning and launching services based on their needs. " Michael Stephens.

"Without a firm foundation in the mission and goals of the institution, new technologies are not implemented for the sake of coolness and status. " Michael Stephens.

"Libraries should welcome the submission of reviews, assignment of keywords (“tagging”), addition of scholarly commentary, and other forms of user participation. ... Libraries should get much greater mileage out of the metadata they create. For example, if geographic names embedded in the middle of subject headings are mapped to latitude and longitude coordinates, it becomes possible to present users with graphical means of searching by place, new ways of easily asking for materials about nearby places, and hierarchical browsing by place." John Riemer.

" Libraries are not just collections of documents and books, they are conversations, they are convocations of people, ideas, and artifacts in dynamic exchange. Libraries are not merely in communities, they are communities " Wendy Schultz.

The City of Brotherly Love

We are all off to Philly for the weekend. Trying to extract every ounce of pleasure from Pennsylvania before I leave. My son wants to visit the "disturbingly informative" Mutter Museum. I am just looking forward to some good food, good company, and a historically interesting city.

So, no blogging this weekend. The real world beckons!

Network or Internet Neutrality

Congress is considering the issue of "net neutrality" this session (HR 5252 and HR 5273 amongst others.) Despite the slightly Gibsonesque sound of the phrase, this is an issue that we should all be concerned about, or at least aware of.

Net neutrality concerns the rules that govern transmission via the Internet. A good summary and a lot more information can be found at the Center for Democracy & Technology. The CDT is one of the best, and most respected, policy organizations active in the area of technology and public policy. It is well worth consulting on Internet policy and various digital privacy issues.

When you begin to try and fight your way through the thicket of information out there about net neutrality from competing organizations, it can get very confusing very fast. A couple of analogies help. One way to think about net neutrality is to compare the internet to roads. Our system of public roads are neutral. Anyone with a car, gas, and who meets the legal requirements, can travel on any road. If they were not neutral, in the way that some of the pending legislation in Congress proposes, then it would be as though Walmart had an HOV lane that its customers could travel on from home to the local Walmart, but that bypassed the small shops downtown. Of course, the difference between our roads and the Internet is that our roads are largely publicly funded, the Internet is no longer publicly funded.

Another analogy would be to the phone network. Once you have a phone and have paid for service your calls to anyone on the network are all treated equally. There is no difference in sound quality or ease of connection between calls. Again, the system is neutral. If it were not neutral then it would be as though your bank could pay to make sure that your calls to them were clearer and connections easier to make than your calls to your mother.

As you might expect, this policy development process in Congress is shaping up to be a classic battle of industrial interest group politics. In some ways it reminds me of some of the history of Florida's development detailed in Grunwald's book that I mentioned in my 7/16/06 post to this blog. The telecommunication industry and their supporters are proposing the move away from net neutrality because they own the wires etc. upon which the Internet runs and they could make a lot of money by selling tiered access to digital content providers. They say that this revenue will enable them to continue to build the network and to fund innovation. The content providers, user groups, and the software industry tend to oppose the move away from net neutrality because they don't want to pay those increased costs. They could use that money to fund their own innovation in digital content etc. and worry that the telecomms will simply use the extra money as a windfall profit. Of course, the telecomms are also very interested in becoming content providers and one way to look at this is an attempt by those industry players to gain an advantage over their rivals in this field. Thus a classic battle of industrial interest group politics: who gets to pay and who gets to profit?

User groups think they are paying enough already and worry that a tiered system of access will continue a trend towards the consolidation of power on the Internet amongst the wealthiest corporations. Educational and library groups are, of course, both users and content providers, and so have come out for net neutrality and against the proposed legislation. Libraries are concerned that users will be even less likely to begin their research at a library website if that site is slow to load and tough to find because they know that they will not be able to pay for top tier access. They also fear that they will be forced to pay a premium for access to online database vendors (like Proquest, which the Olin Library licenses a number of databases from, or EBSCO) who will pay for top tier access and pass the costs onto their library customers. This tiered access will also have the effect of steering users towards resources with top tier access and away from other resources based on access, not some other measure of utility. Educational institutions are concerned that they too will not be able to afford top tier access and thus traffic to, from, and between research institutions will be hampered. Transferring information between research institutions was the very raison d'etre of the Internet, so they are naturally concerned.
But there is a real issue here that the telecomms are forcing us to consider; who pays for innovation? If we truly think that a for-profit, market driven model will produce the greatest innovation then why shouldn't the for-profit providers of the networks be allowed to profit in new ways from their investment? We could all potentially gain from their innovation. The old monopolistic and highly regulated Ma Bell telephone company or the old power utility companies were very reliable, but not innovative. Is it fair to consign a particular industry to a highly regulated role so that others can profit?

I tend towards the neutrality side of this debate, you might not. In any case, it will impact your life over the next decades. Love them or hate them, the Internet and South Florida, both came to be how they are today through these kind of policy battles. You should keep informed.

Managers -- who needs them?

An article in the business section of the New York Times ("Maybe We Should Leave That Up to the Computer" New York Times 7/18/06 C4, available from Rollins here) got me thinking. Chris Snijders, a Dutch sociologist, thinks that routine managerial decisions are best left to computers and he has the research to prove it, at least to his own satisfaction.

Mr. Snijders studied the decision making of experienced purchasing managers in over 300 corporations and compared the quality of their software and hardware purchasing decisions. His home page gives more details about his findings but basically he found that experienced managers used less data and more of their intuition to guide their decisions and were outperformed by relatively simple computing algorithms.

I like these kind of articles for a couple of reasons. First they can be viewed as just another step in the long de-centering of humankind. Starting with the Copernican revolution which placed the sun instead of the earth at the center of the universe all the way to recent studies of animal behavior that are showing more and more traits that we thought were uniquely human are shared with various other species. It is bracing to be forced to consider what is really unique and important about what, in this case, a manager brings to an organization.

Secondly, and this is where librarians and the wider educational mission of the college comes in, how do we prepare students for a world in which as the NYT article notes, "humans becom[e] increasingly peripheral in making routine decisions, concentrating instead on designing ever better models"? Issues of critical thinking and information literacy, as well a technical capabilities, are key here and I think librarians -- in partnership with the teaching faculty -- need to play a part in preparing students for this new work environment. However, we must also remember that most decisions that we take (whether as managers or not) are not routine. Education (and reading widely and deeply in literature and non-fiction) should help us recognize the difference between the routine and extraordinary and help us act accordingly.

Federated Searching -- fad or future?

A colleague of mine, an instruction librarian in an academic library, is writing an essay on federated searching and asked my opinion of such applications. I know this is something that people at the Olin Library have been considering recently, so I thought you might be interested in my thoughts on this issue.

The University of Pittsburgh Libraries have been using a federated searching application from Webfeat for a couple of years and that is the only application with which I have any experience. Other vendors include the Open Source DBWiz, MetaLib, SirsiDynix's partner MuseGlobal, and Central Search. This is a fast moving field so I am sure there will be others and by the time you read this some of these vendors may have gobbled each other up. Welcome to the wonderful world of library systems software!

When I explain federated searching to library users I usually start by saying, think of it as Google for libraries. An easy way to search multiple databases with one search and get relevant results all in much the same format. The user can quickly and seamlessly move from search to fulltext, avoid doing the same search multiple times, using different search techniques for different databases, and then searching again for the fulltext of the articles they seek. Sounds great right? What could possibly be bad about such software?

Before I tell you my opinion you must realize that I am a librarian. That makes me very different from the vast majority of library users. I think it was Roy Tennant who said, "Librarians like to search. Everyone else likes to find." I have made a career out of understanding how to search for information and how to help others search, and I hope find, what they need. I understand how to search a variety of databases and interfaces. I even read the introductions to reference books. The bottomline is that my opinions about federated searching are probably very different from a normal library user, so take them with a pinch of salt. This is something that I find librarians forget too often.

That being said, I find that federated searching software feels like a scrim in the theater. It makes everything slightly hazy, and softens the definition of the individual information objects I seek. I am left with the feeling that I want to tear the curtain away to get to the real information in the databases below.

Information is complex, in format, content, and in the relationships between information objects. Federated searching makes each piece seem very similar to every other -- the record of a book chapter, a journal article, a video, a government document, etc. All look alike and it takes extra effort to work out what you have retrieved. The implementations of federated searching in libraries usually strive for simplicity and exacerbate this homogenization problem.

The current versions of federated searching cannot cope with the most sophisticated elements of library databases; the niceties of controlled vocabulary, or the tree structure of MeSH. Searching is reduced to relevance and keyword searching, and thus ends up being quite blunt.

I often see the results of these problems at the reference desk. Users come to the desk frustrated that they cannot find what they want after having tried a federated search, or unable to interpret the results of a federated search. I find that the most common solution for these users is to show them how to go directly to the most appropriate database for their information need, where a more directed search quickly retrieves what they want. However, only the most persistent and confident users will come to the reference desk after an unsatisfactory search. Many others will seek help from a friend or colleague, try a very different approach, or just give up. Presumably many others are perfectly happy with the results of their federated search. Librarians must be careful not to draw conclusions about the average library user based on the minority who seek assistance from a reference librarian.

I do like the ability to search multiple databases simultaneously and to quickly see which databases might reward further searching when a federated search system tells me how many hits I get for a search in each database. Selecting a database to search has always been a mysterious task for novice library users and anything that helps them with this task is to be
welcomed. I also see that my criticisms make me sound like the experienced Dialog searchers in the generation of librarians just before my own. I would listen to their war stories of finely tuned, cost-effective searches in arcane databases and their grumblings about the younger generation of wasteful searchers and secretly think that their expertise had be superseded. Perhaps, like them, I am just getting old and curmudgeonly.

One final point, I am not convinced that federated searching will not turn out to be a transitional technology, like CD-ROM jukeboxes, more an expression of a temporary limitation in the technology available in libraries than a transformational technology that fundamentally alters how people interact with information.

Still the technology bears watching and the answer for libraries probably lies in implementing such search capabilities while maintaining access to individual databases and continuing to do what we have always done, work with users individually and in groups to help them understand the many ways to search for and find information.

Michael Grunwald's "The Swamp."

Continuing with the weekend theme, here is a book I have been recommending to friends recently: Michael Grunwald's "The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise" from Simon & Schuster (2006.) It is available in the Olin Library at call number F317 .E9 G78 2006. It is about the fight to first develop the Everglades, and later to protect them. Along the way Grunwald provides a lot of Florida history for a newbie like me. He also makes clear that development in the United States (and I am sure we are not unique in this) has proceed more often on the basis of greed, hubris, and a cozy relationship between political and economic power than manifest destiny, the invisible operation of market forces, or reasonable stewardship of our environment.

I came away from the book not knowing whether to lament how much of Florida's natural environment has be degraded and destroyed or to be heartened by how much has been saved. As someone who grew up in a country that had pretty much banished wilderness before the United States even came into existence, I am always astonished by the environmental richness that remains in this country.

I can't wait to explore.