Your Library on the Web

Your library on the web looked at how Talis, and in particular Tais Prism 3 is being developed to enhance user experiences of the library. The session started by looking at each institutions / organisations web presence and asking if:

• Content was getting richer
• What are users needs
• What devices will be used to access information in the future
• How do we know if information is being used

Mobile learning will become the norm, this video advertising Kaplan university, promotes the use of learning anywhere:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e50YBu14j3U

Looked at Edinburgh public library's site -this has just won awards:
http://yourlibrary.edinburgh.gov.uk

Library Catalogues

The following Prism 3 users have introduced innovative ways of engaging with their users:

Liverpool Public libraries

• on the front screen they have displayed new titles
• added google maps
• using RSS feeds

University of Northampton

• showing alternative sources for resources
• have a link through to purchase the book from amazon (Amazon pay the University for click throughs)

Leeds City Council

• requesting feedback from the catalogue,
• using facebook
• e-books show if they can play on a PC or a MAC

East Renfrewshire

• are using: follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Library Elf

Manchester University

• Have incorporated Chinese characters into the catalogue

Karen Reece discussed the possibility of using different Prism interfaces for different cohorts.
University of Sheffield are building an iphone app for Prism 3
There are now 50 customers that have switched to Prism 3, 31 have gone live. There is a 10 year life span span for Prism 3

Talis Assisting you - Brandon Amos

SaaS products: Engage (Public/community), Aspire (reading lists / Prism 3

Engage has been used at Coventry libraries were they have created tag clouds

The Furture of the Web- Andy Latham

Africa have bypassed desktop PCs and gone straight to mobile devices.

Phones are now becoming directional - will soon be able to plug in an RFID reader into phones and find books on the shelf.

Looked at Talis involvement with the semantic web - can see govt. information @:
http://data.gov.uk/

Predictions for the future:

• Ubiquitous mobiole devices
• Media agnostic devices - move between books/music etc.
• Location awareness devices
• Content surfaced everywhere
• Open data
• Linked data
• Merged services

The only constant is change

RSP Workshop for Repository Administrators, 4th Aug 2010

This event was aimed at people who work with the day-to-day running and adminstration of a repostitory, and therefore had a much more practical slant to the sessions, and sharing of tips between the delegates was encouraged throughout all of the sessions, so it proved to be a useful and enjoyable day!

The day started with an introduction, and then a short talk on the background to Open Access.  Rachel Proudfoot then delivered a session on Contacting Publishers: Issues and Tips.  The main points I took from this were:

• Look at the Sherpa request letter template, and also template for author's to use if they need to contact the publishers directly.  (We could supply this to author's when we have to ask them to contact the publishers)
• See if you can get a blanket response from publishers so you do not have to keep contacting them.  However it was noted that some publishers request that you contact them for each item.
• Record the responses that are received from each publisher.
• Consider having a formalised 'chase policy' to track publishers that dont respond.
• Feedback publishers reponses to depositors.
• Standardise version terminology to reduce confusion.
  
  

Survive or Thrive: Making the most of your digital content (JISC Conference 8th & 9th June)

SORT took place over 2 days - presentations all related in some way to the conference background paper which addresses how the LIS community can make the most of the huge amounts of digital content now available on the web. Subjects were very wide ranging but some key ideas I took away were:

• Reduce redundant effort by using shared services and use savings to fund new services
• Make your data freely available and reusable - can add value
• Sharing content can help engage users

Owen Stephens liveblogged the day and has given a much more in depth and accurate write up of the days than I could manage. So rather than repeating what's already been written below are the main points I took from  sessions I attended.

RSP Preservation Day

27 May 2010

The day focused on the higher level workings of digital preservation, engaging the right stakeholders, creating a high level preservation policy and getting preservation on the agenda at University level. It also showcased a number of toolkits and audit checklists to help organisations with preservation.

Summon increasing usage

Marshall Breeding reports on a study by Michigan’s Grand Valley State University which shows how intoducing Summon has increased usage of their resources. Full article here which has a range of impressive stats including:

Summon is enabling students to go directly to full-text, boosting the use of a variety of databases. For example, Academic Search Premier saw a usage increase of 92% and ABI/INFORM rose 354%.

NoWAL Sustaining Digitisation Projects

I attended this event at Liverpool University on 27/05/10.

The main themes for the day were engaging with stakeholders, creating and maintaining policies, advocacy, staffing, and preservation.

Converis Demo

Matt Bowell (Research and Graduate College) organised a demo of Converis, a Research Information System. The Research Information System will potentially replace SEEK and help to integrate University functions more effectively, including HR, SIS, Finance and of course USIR.

Lynne and I have written some notes which can be found on the V:Drive at:
V:\ILS\aCustomerServices\UniResearch\Projects\Research Management Systems\Converis Notes.doc

Demo slides are also availale from the same location, document is titled Converis Demo Slides.

Encore Synergy

III have released Encore Synergy which provides access to articles as well as the existing catalogue functionality. It differs from Summon, EDS etc on that it doesn't use a harvested index to provide article results but instead uses web services to dynamically generate the results from the content providers. It also doesn't interfile the article results but presents a small set in the initial results list, with links to more.

Marshall Breeding has given a write up and a few early adopters are already using Encore Synergy including the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Summon @ Huddersfield and Northumbria

Huddersfield and Northumbria are working on a JISC project to do with their implementations of Summon. Yesterday they held a workshop to share their experiences so far - some notes are available here. Interested to see that both institutions seem to be replacing their federated search with Summon - I'd thought you'd still need both.

NOWAL - Cross Search Event

On Friday 14th May - Exlibris, Serial Solutions and Ebsco attended the NOWAL - Cross Search Event. The suppliers were urged to concentrate on what marks their own product as being different from, and better than, the competition.

All suppliers started their presentations with a short overview of the company and then went on to describe current students expectations with regards to learning and research. Generally they want 'Google like' single, quick and easy search interface, with some expectation of enhanced functionality. Below is some of the functionality that the suppliers highlighted.

Exlibris presented first with Primo Central. They focused on how they meet these user expectations with Primo Central by providing

• a single search box that searched all and then consolidated the results
• display order choice
• narrow down easily
• Suggested new searches
• Collaboration tools
• Manage findings on system or via bookmarking tools
  
• BX recommender tool
• Easy integration of Primo Central into other library systems

Addressing some of the libraries issues they also explained:-

• The federated searching element of Primo Central. The same search is carried out in the federated search but the results are not merged with the pre-harvested, although this is being considered.
• Approx 80% of HE material is available via the pre-harvested interface
  
• Primo interface is highly configurable and thus suited to consortia arrangements with different institutions wanting different designs and functionality
• FRBR to merge and deduplicate
• Weighting utility that ensure important material for a particular institution is displayed first
• Can by hosted in house or by Exlibris
• Deals with different langauage scripts
• Admin interface uses wizards to work through configuration and interface setup
• Real time updates from LMS on availability
  

Serials Solutions presented Summon. Focus on how to meet users expectations:-

• Provide a single search interface to everything
• 80% of queries, results in 1 second or less
  
• 6,200 publishers with 570,000,000 items
• Real time call to LMS for location and availability
• syndetics, book covers, abstracts etc
• Narrow down search and ranking
  
• Session based save as well as login save
• Login not required

Addressed library issues:-

• Use Summon for reading lists
• Merge records from different suppliers to provide the best record
• Offered as SAAS
• Client centre available for data administration but no admin interface for configuration or customization at the moment

Final presentation by EBSCO - Discovery Service

User expectations meet:-

• Single Search interface
• Facets to narrow search
• Ranking available
  
• Integrates with LMS and provides book jackets and real time availability data
• Integrates with Link Resolvers from different suppliers but more functionality if you use their own
• Deduplicate and consolidate search results
• Session folder and logged in folder to save results, export and print
• From June 2010 guest access allowed
  

Meet Library expectations:-

• All EBSCO hosted resources and others via pre-harvested
• Non EBSCO hosted resources available as an intergrated federated search (if using EBSCO's federated search tool)
• Can decide which federated search databases are show automatically in pre harvested results based on response times.
• From 2011 much cleaner screen layout
• Can embed search box in web pages
• No deeper integration with LMS at this point only real time availability of items

A very interesting day, providing a good overview of the three products, their similarities and differences.

Anna Langley

Versions of systems

I keep losing track of which version of which system we are on so:

Talis Alto 5.0

Metalib 4.3.2 (Service Packs outstanding - 4.3.3 and 4.3.4 - due to be run in June)
Metalib 4.3.4 (SP run June 2010)


SFX 3

Eprints 3.1

Primo Central Video

Nice little video about Primo Central (although someone's been watching too many Commoncraft videos!)

EPUG-UKI Meeting 16th March

Day started with the AGM which included dates for future meetings:

- EPUG-UKI conference - 1-2 Nov - based on previous SFX/ Metalib day school but will include all products
- EPUG-UKI meetings: 28 or 29 March 2011 and October 2011

Ex Libris update
Mainly updating on new customers e.g. Coventry Uni - Primo; Oxford Uni - Aleph; Sheffield Uni - Verde; Plymouth Uni, Nottingham Uni, Liverpool Uni, Swansea Uni, Cambridge Uni - bX.

Metalib/ SFX strand
- Problems with Full Text / Peer Review Indicator in Metalib - Ex Libris can't provide list of which databases it works with / doesn't work with.
- Knowledgebase working group - working to get NESLI etc to include condition of updating OpenURL providers in licences. Also working on updating existing NESLI targets e.g. Science Direct NESLI target to be added. Will be emailing info about progress and also looking for help with starting on smaller publishers.

- Ex Libris update
SFX 4 - release July 2010. Upgrade docs currently being prepared
Primo Central - Beta testing from end of March, available Q3 2010. Vanderbilt Uni have gone live with it. EL can't publish list of publishers whose content is included but Account Manager should be able to provide details. They will also be able to do a match on your holdings.

URM
Started with general presentation on URM from EL:
- will manage all types of materials & workflows
- customisable using e.g. Open Platform, X-server
- SaaS
- integrate with other parts of institution e.g. finance
- using data where it is e.g. not pulling into system

Building on Rosetta infrastructure (which went live in 2008)

Roadmap:
2010 - complete requirements gathering
Mid 2011 - beta version to beta partners
Mid 2012 - general release although won't have all functionality of all systems
End 2012 - first live systems

Also presentations from members of URM focus groups - looking at specific bits of functionality in their areas e.g. Circulation and Fulfilment group looking at Digitisation workflow from making request through to acquisition, Selection & Acquisition looked at selection tools, usage stats. General opinion is that the groups are working and are feeding into the EL development of URM.

I know we are using this for reporting back on external events etc but if possible it would be nice to use as a forum for new ideas things we would like to do in the future. They might not come to anything but it might be a nice place to record ideas:-

I was just wondering whether there would be any scope for using comments and rating functionality within reading list software.

Look at customizing the reports within Google Analytics on the LMS

Anna

Visit to Huddersfield Uni - 28th Feb 2010

Angela and myself took a trip across the Pennines to visit Dave Pattern at the University of Huddersfield. The main purpose of the trip was to look at developments on their OPAC but we also talked Summon and repositories.

Dave's added lots of enhancements to their OPAC (Horizon, Sirsi Dynix):

Keyword search tag cloud - on the front page of the OPAC. Shows most popular search terms - very popular at the start of term.

Keyword suggestions - suggestions of other related keywords to include in your search

Stats available to staff - restricted by IP range staff can see loan statistics for the book they are looking at in the catalogue.

People who borrowed this also borrowed.... - following the introduction of this a bigger range of stock has been borrowed, more books have been borrowed and people are renewing less often

Other editions - uses data from Library Thing

Virtual Shelf browse - most popular feature - let's you browse the shelf (by classmark) from the OPAC

Primo Central webinar 9th Feb 2010

Quick recap - Primo Central is an index of scholarly material, hosted and managed by Ex Libris which will be free to Metalib customers. It will be released in the Metalib Knowledgebase in Q3 2010 and will contain articles, ebooks and some other e-content and will index the bib data, abstracts and full text.

The webinar showed that there's a large list of publishers signed up - some such as EBSCO will only be available to subscribers (although it wasn't clear exactly how this will be configured).The info should be up to date - the index will be updated daily for most resources but more often where necessary. Some thing which I hadn't realised is that you will be able to see where each result has come from so can link to that database to do a more in depth search.

The main advantage is that search response will be much faster - rather than having to wait for individual databases to send results it will all be comign from one place.

Summon Demo

Myself and Angela went to a demo of Summon last week. Whilst Serials Solutions were there, the majority of the presentation was given by Liverpool Uni who gave a fairly 'warts and all' talk about their experience with Summon (which they have been beta testing).

The big difference between Summon (and others like Ebsco Discovery Service) and the other next generation OPACs is that Summon harvests and indexes content so that searching is much quicker, getting rid of the waiting familiar to users of federated search tools. You can search across the catalogue and other sources such as databases from a single search box. Features found in other search and discovery tools were available, such as facets and  book jackets.

For electronic resources you can restrict the results only to those resources you subscribe to but also add in results from outside your subscriptions which are contained within the Summon index. You can also link to the full text - rather than being hosted on Summon you use the link resolver to link to the full text.

Feedback from users has been that the system is intuitive and easy to use. However, as it seems to be with every system, Summon isn't perfect. Liverpool highlighted some of the issues they'd come across:
- No de-duplication of results so in the example shown, there were 5 records for one book.
- Results from databases don't show where they've come from so it's not possible for users to find a relevant database and go off and search it in more detail.
- Gaps in the coverage of content - not all databases are indexed (and it's very unlikely they ever will be) but it's not always clear which one's are so you can't tell users exactly what they are searching. There's currently no way to link to a federated search tool to address these gaps.
- Testing has shown that indexing of content isn't always up to date, for example, some journals were a few issues behind so users can't find current articles.

But despite these issues Summon does seem to be a step in the right direction - offering fast searching across (nearly) all our resources from one search box. The interface is clean, attractive and easy to use and using the facets to drill down into the results seems to work smoothly.

Liverpool Uni's Summon can be freely accessed at http://www.liv.ac.uk/Library/e-library/summon.html (although they thought they would put it behind their proxy once they fully released it).

ECHO360

Was invited to a demo of ECHO360 as part of the pilot at Salford University. ECHO360 is a lecture capture software that can be set up to automatically put links to relevant content into particular programme / modules on Blackboard.

It records audio, video and the sides being used. The user can move between view and request relevant programmes as part of an RSS feed.

In addition to using this software in it's traditional way it is also being used in really interesting ways such as to provide feedback to students while marking assignment or even being used by students to present assignments.

Anna