David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

ALA Midwinter 2007: OCLC Social Networking Panel

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These are notes from the session I participated in…

Lisa (need to find her last name!):

  • They created I-Go, a library toolbar. Quicklinks to library resources. The search on the toolbar searches lots of stuff (ie., library resources). Cool. It DOESN’T search Google.
  • MySpace: www.myspace.com/undergradlibrary – cool URL. They have chosen to not actively recruit friends. They repost info into the myspace blog. Have a federated search tool embedded within their myspace page. Also have a link to add this search tool thingie onto your myspace page. Cool. And they allow the search to show results without proxy – then you have to enter username etc to actually get articles
  • Facebook: David Ward is their Facebook profile… had to use a name. And then plastered their real library name on the page, so it appears in searches.
  • Facebook flyers: displays as an ad to their UI network. $10 a day.
  • Second Life: are starting to work with this via the CyberCity infoisland thing.

I spoke next (Jenny took good notes)…

Jenny Levine:

  • ALA is exploring creating online community for members.
  • Not sure why she posts to flickr, other than it’s fun.
  • Has a friend that keeps friends updated with Facebook.
  • Joined the Facebook group “when I was your age, Pluto was a planet”
  • “social retailing” – HD monitor that feeds out of the dressing room, so friends can see what you’re trying on… and help you decide what looks good on you.
  • Twitter – text message your status… why do this?
  • Yahoo groups as an example of online community – her example is a very active group.
  • Ways to interact: use ebsco’s rss feed, other library feeds… they can display on the yahoo groups page! That way you support the group and go where the users are… cool idea!

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ALA Midwinter 2007: MARS Hot Topics Discussion on OPACS

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MARS hot topics discussion group, mars products and services committee: Not your Dad’s Interface: next generation opacs and search engines

Endeca: Someone from NCSU spoke

  • Endeca is not a replacement for their catalog
  • Barnes and Noble, Walmart – both use Endeca as search front-ends…
  • Does great relevance ranking, and allows you to tweak those

AquaBrowser: Someone from King County Public Library spoke

  • Deadends – syndetics content
  • Deadends – searches that bring up no results
  • No option for database implementation
  • It has RSS!
  • The need – a desire to escape OPAC limitations
  • OPAC keyword search didn’t always work
  • Also didn’t work for Ref desk staff
  • great search example – song, “Another Sunny Day” – catalog can’t find it by song title, unless they use an odd pull-down menu (using librarian terminology) – Aquabrowser just finds the song.
  • Color coding and other visual search options allow customers to browse in ways they can’t in the OPAC
  • Some librarians hate it
  • Liked ILS independence
  • The “cool factor” – very important for public libraries
  • Ran a Survey Monkey usability survey… customers liked it “gave more options when you don’t know what you’re looking for”
  • Realities: ILS independent? have to have unique ID for bib records
  • Interesting – AquaBrowser server keeps load off of the ILS server
  • Have to update AquaBrowser every night for new items
  • Also not their default catalog link (they’re trying to raise awareness of it, so they have AquaBrowser as another search option)
  • Catalogers love it – it’s a great clean-up tool (because it searches better)

Grokker: Jody Fagan, James Madison University

  • They did usability tests with EBSCOHost’s visual search interface
  • Everyone who has an EBSCOHost product has this visual interface – EBSCOHost administrator has the ability to set this up through the administrator interface
  • Half of the students tested liked the visual search interface better than the traditional search
  • From EBSCOHost – 1% of libraries have disabled visual search
  • And visual searches accounts for only 1% of all searches
  • Summary: change default search behavior from phrase to and search (mirrors googleish search); show visual search as an option

Interesting – two of the presenters showed screencast snippets as part of their presentation. Cool.

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David’s internet Librarian 2006 Wrap-up

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IL2006 Day 3: Closing Keynote: All the World’s a game… and all the men and women merely players

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Elizabeth Lane Lawley

Aside from Jane Dysart: 1493 people came to IL2006 this year…

many2many – group blog on social software… check it out sometime

terra nova – blog on virtual worlds … hmm… check it out too

She thinks games are as important as she used to think blogging was important

Lane is into World of Warcraft

What is a game?

  • a form of play with goals and structure…
  • etc (two more vague definitions)
  • The consistent stuff – structure, goals, maybe prizes

So – Learning 2.0 – it’s a game – structure, goals, and prizes!

www.42entertainment.com./see.html – cool experience type things on this page…

Check out the enthusiastic/active/casual description… it’d be good to use as a different type of experience – one for customers. More than customer focused… hmm… more thinking is needed.

macarthur foundation – macfound.org – huge opportunity to go for grants on gaming/informal learning through them…

She sees Second Life as the AOL of 10 years ago.