TechEssence.info

With Roy's gracious permission, I am going to hijack TechEssence briefly to canvass its readership about a potential conference-related set of online-only tutorials and workshops. If you couldn't be more horrified by the idea, pray accept my apologies for disturbing you and go on to the next post.

Resource sharing is changing. Formalized resource sharing arrangements are growing. Library catalogs are being unionized making unmediated borrowing between libraries possible. Users are responding positively to the improved interfaces of catalogs that allow them to easily search, locate and request items, from almost anywhere, for themselves. Resource sharing and interlending is increasing dramatically. As a result, demands on delivery services are high and likely to grow.

It is time to rethink the role of the library catalog.

Introduction

The library catalog is not sacred. At its root it just an index -- a list of the things found in a library. Is is and was important to maintain an inventory list because the things -- mostly books -- found in libraries are valuable, and one wants to control one's valuable assets. The provision of such a list to the public makes it easier for larger numbers of people to see what is available from a library. Hence, the shelf-list made its way out of back room into the public area, but from the beginning the catalog was (and to a great degree still is) a librarian's tool.

I am not actually a very good information architect. Well, I'm not actually an information architect at all. So pontificating about information architecture would be more than a little presumptuous of me. Instead, I'll recommend you some of the books and websites I've read, liked, and used. I hope they'll get you started.

Data mining or knowledge discovery refers to the process of finding interesting information in large repositories of data. The term data mining also refers to the step in the knowledge discovery process in which special algorithms are employed in hopes of identifying interesting patterns in the data. These interesting patterns are then analyzed yielding knowledge. The desired outcome of data mining activities is to discover knowledge that is not explicit in the data, and to put that knowledge to use.

Librarians involved in digital libraries are already benefiting from data mining techniques as they explore ways to automatically classify information and explore new approaches for subject clustering (MetaCombine Project). As the field grows, new applications for libraries are likely to evolve and it will be important for library administrators to have a basic understanding of the technology.

A wide variety of data mining techniques are also employed by industry and government. Many of these activities pose threats to personal privacy. As professionals ethically bound to ensure that individual privacy is safe-guarded, data mining activities should be monitored and kept on every librarian’s radar.

A colleague forwarded an announcement to me in which an open web-based reference management service announced it now supports OpenURLs as if that were the end of it. Unfortunately, it's only the beginning, and a rough one at that.

I was in a meeting this week where the topic of “Data-centric” vs. “Document-centric” XML arose. These concepts aren’t immediately obvious, and it took me a reasonable amount of time to understand them. So here’s the deal…

My local public library has a survey up about its website. I took it. I was, shall we say, not complimentary (though I was constructive). My local public library's website requires four clicks at the least just to get to a catalog search box.

I'm guessing your library's website isn't quite that bad. Still, one of these days you'll be reworking it, and that's a scary, scary project. How do you even get started?

That title's not meant to be facetious. I’ve never met a programmer that I did not like…seriously. O.K., maybe one, but that was at another job and it was because he was pretty weird--he said he had “fast eyes” and needed a monitor with a super high refresh rate. What the heck are fast eyes? "I am not like regular people,” said he. We might not have liked each other, but at least we agreed on that point. But I digress.

Executive Summary

SRW/U is an acronym for Search/Retrieve via the Web or URL and you might want to think of it as Sonne of Z39.50 sans the federated searching.

What It Is

Z39.50 is (was) a protocol -- a communication method -- for information retrieval. Originally designed to allow for the searching of remote databases, and while rather arcane, it truly was ahead of its time. (Much like the MARC record data structure, arcane but ahead if its time.)