Author Archive | Paula Hane

Walter Nelson, library webmaster at The RAND Corp., talked about multiple digital library projects that he has worked on at RAND and elsewhere. He says that digital libraries are not arcane and tough and they can be created on a shoestring. The shoestring takes many forms:

• Limited funds
• Limited labor
• Lack of technical expertise
• Lack of management interest/support
• Institutional resistance to new or complex applications.

A key question is, if you have content that is available to the public, do people need to search your interface to find it? If it’s hard to find, will your audience have the patience to find it? Should it be findable by Google? (If it isn’t on Google, does it exist?)

He says be prepared to embrace non-traditional tools – if it gets the job done, use it. A digital library is NOT a digital archive – archives are more about preservation than about user experience

A Digital Object comes in many forms – PDF, DOC, XLS, PPT, media, web page, etc. The PDF is king of multipage documents – it has broad acceptance, most users can open it, and it’s likely to be supported for awhile. He recommends converting other doc formats to PDF. He recommends making your PDFs findable by search engines by entering clear author and title descriptions.

He says the ebook market is in flux so don’t embrace new formats until things settle down. Some ereaders support PDF but the Amazon Kindle doesn’t.

He lists these as findability options:

• Library OPAC
• Drupal – it’s open source, includes the search engine, includes “biblio” and “faceted search” modules, it’s good at handling multiple authors (he’s not allowed to use it at RAND but has used it for other projects, including his own website), it can be loaded on your own server, it’s easy to install and use, and it creates pages that are search engine friendly
• SharePoint – his least favorite option; designed for collaboration, can be expensive, search is bad, confusing to administer

People will go right to your content in many cases, bypassing your home page – so you should have good navigation on all your pages. Consider using a cover sheet on all your PDFs.

His bottom line: If your library isn’t digital, it has a very limited future.

Go to walternelson.com to download his presentation in PDF – note that it has a proper title!

Paula J. Hane

ITI News Bureau Chief

Mary Ellen Bates always manages to come up with some new search sites and tips that prove useful even to someone who follows the search world closely. Her main focus is on how we can “un-Google” ourselves. “It’s not about finding the information. It’s about what we do with the information—it’s our value add.”

She covered some of the same search engines mentioned in the earlier session by Chris Sherman—but in fact offered rebuttals to some of his comments. While he listed Wolfram/Alpha as one of the 4 major players, she said not to think of it as a search engine—it’s a great data visualization tool. In fact, visualizations of data—charts, graphs, clouds, etc.—were an important theme for her.

She also took issue with Chris over the usefulness of Twitter. She says that the 140 character limit bugs some people but she loves the distillation of comments – a great discipline she called it. She gave some interesting examples of how a Twitter search could hone in for local, e.g., “swine flu” OR H1N1 near:denver within:25mi.

Google Squared is another great tool for adding value—and it does it in the background. For example, for arthritis drugs it produced a useful table of extracted information on the fly that can be exported to Excel and edited. Clients should love this.

Some other favorites include OneRiot, Search Cloulet, University Channel, Bing Visual Search, and Google News Timeline. Mary Ellen’s always information and entertaining. Her site BatesInfo.com/il2009 has live links to what she covered.

Paula J. Hane

ITI News Bureau Chief

Chris Sherman, moderator Deb Hunt, Mary Ellen Bates

Chris Sherman has been keeping a close eye on the search engines for as long as anyone and he says we’ve seen a consolidation down to just 4 major players. He had folks guess which was which—and they weren’t that obvious.

• The guardian of the conservative status quo (surprisingly, it’s Google)
• Proud owner of the Emperor’s new clothes (the easy one – Yahoo!)
• The assimilator as innovator (Microsoft, which used to be the acquirer)
• The shiny new disruptor (Wolfram/Alpha, which made quite a splash this year)

Chris says that Google is doing interesting things (and he reviewed quite a list, including Fast Flip, Google Squared, etc.) but they’re not earth shattering. The company has lost its momentum as a “leading indicator,” he says.

Yahoo is going back to its roots as a browse service. Chris seemed most impressed by Microsoft and the cool features of Bing. Another surprise for me was putting Wolfram/Alpha as the 4^th player. It says it’s not a search engine but a “computational knowledge engine.” But, he noted that it draws on high-quality licensed data sets.

He gave a fairly deprecating opinion of “real-time” search—“it won’t have any lasting value as a search medium for info pros. He wonders whether Facebook and Twitter will be around in 10 years. He finished by discussing the huge trend of ad targeting—some benign, such as geographic or language targeting, and then behavioral targeting, which raises privacy concerns. His bottom line: search engine competition has increased and this should drive innovation.

Paula J. Hane

ITI News Bureau Chief