‘puters

LoC Catalog Enrichment Initiative

The titles that libraries are removing to remote storage facilities often are the same ones that have the least rich library records, thus dooming them forever to being less and less frequently accessed. What to do? Enter the Library of Congress Catalog Enrichment Initiative.

users who rely on browsing the library shelf for the purposes of discovery and selection risk missing more and more material that might be of interest. Anecdotal and transaction log evidence has it that few use the browse feature of library online catalogs, not only because it is uninteresting visually but because the information users need in order to select what they want is not present. Until recently there has been no recourse except to the stacks.

google scholar, some more perspectives

Posted on 19Nov04 by jessamyn

Jeremy at Digital Librarian has a few more words about Google Scholar [or as some are calling it, schoogle] that sums up a lot of how I feel about it. [see also: metafilter and slashdot]

We need to stop be re-active, and start being proactive. Our vendors are not going to move us forward in the ways we need; they are reactive to our needs, not to our future. It is very easy to be passive as a community, and to let outside forces map our route. It is much harder to take control of the wheel and do the mapping ourselves. But until we do, the “Where do we want to go today?” will continue to be the rhetorical question that is only answered by the company (or vendor community) that asks it.

google scholar, let the feeding frenzy begin

Posted on 18Nov04 by jessamyn

Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price give us an overview of Google Scholar. A few quick facts to supplement their about page.

Google won’t say what it does and does not consider “scholarly”. My search turned up lots of books which then allowed me to do either a “library search” [worldcat, natch] or a web search [Google] for the title which I found strange.
no ads on Google Scholar pages
Some citation linking, some full text, same old problem of getting a good cite and then hitting a subscription database wall.

Upshot? Don’t know. As a public librarian, I find less and less reason to dig around in scholarly archives. On the other hand, just as I fear that WorldCat searching will become inaccurately synonymous with “find it at a library” I don’t want to see this filling in for “find it in a research paper” Librarians know the difference, does everyone else?

is it just that we don’t like to work together? why don’t we build an OPAC?

Posted on 18Nov04 by jessamyn

Why doesn’t the library community band together to do some collaborative software development and free ourselves from vendor tyranny? If you just like to watch, keep an eye on the open-ils blog as they work through some of the decisions involved in creating a large library automation system.

google + ALA web site = ?

Posted on 03Nov04 by jessamyn

One of the search engines that ALA is contemplating the replace the one on their site is the Google search appliance. I’m still mucking about with the various options, but it seems that there are definite benefits to having a search engine that many if not most ALA members (and the public) already know how to use…. or do they? Tara links to Google’s cheet sheet and then adds a few additional syntaxes you might not know about.