Millennium Control Bar

Originally uploaded by Hatchibombotar.

The Millennium Control Bar for the Macintosh client for Innovative Interfaces’ Millennium product is the best/worst (take your pick) example of mystery meat navigation that I have to deal with on a semi-regular basis.

Just what are those buttons supposed to mean? Sure, you can mouse over them to get a tooltip, but I usually have to mouse over half of them to find the thing I want. I also often forget that the one that says “WebOPAC” doesn’t go to controls to change the web version of the catalog, but instead just launches that in a browser window. Which I suppose would be helpful if I couldn’t remember where my library’s catalog was on the web.

The only consolation is that this is just a staff interface and not inflicted on the public.

When I last wrote about Casey Bisson’s apparent plan to use the money from his Mellon award to pay for Library of Congress catalog records which he would then turn around and make freely available, you will recall that I was scratching my head a bit. Can he do that? And if he does, so what?

Since that post, there have been at least two interesting discussions of the issues.

First is the Talking With Talis podcast, The Mellon rewards WPOpac… and opens an Open Data door?, wherein Paul Miller, Ross Singer, Rob Styles, Tim Spalding, and Richard Wallis hash it out and decide that, wherever this is going, it is good and likely important.

Then there is Dan Chudnov at One Big Library who says that Open Data is not the point and believes that the enthusiasm around this idea is mostly “gushing” and “fawning.” For various reasons (librarians have been working on sharing data for generations, the LC data isn’t necessarily all that interesting) he believes this development may not be all that interesting or exciting.

If you are interested in this topic at all, I highly recommend the podcast and Chudnov’s post (and the comments on Chudnov’s post).

In the Talis podcast, Ross Singer says,

I think the problem with the Library of Congress data announcement is that it’s a little difficult for people to make heads or tails of what they are going to be able to do with that….To just your average librarian at your average library, what does that actually mean to you? A huge binary file of MARC records, what exactly are you going to do with this?

And one of the Talis guys (sorry, podcasts make it difficult to tell who is speaking) points out that for the average librarian, a project or service that can be demonstrated to work with our existing infrastructure is probably what we will need before we get excited.

And, for my part, I agree. When I hear that someone as obviously sharp as Casey Bisson is making library data more open and available, I have to assume it is a Good Thing. But I’m still having a problem wrapping my head around what this is really going to mean to anyone.

Bisson, for his part, seems to be awfully quiet about all this. I’m sure he isn’t really having second thoughts. (So apologies for the cartoon. My new Mac Mini arrived yesterday with Comic Life pre-loaded. I couldn’t resist.) But it would be nice to hear just what he really does have in mind.

So we all know that Casey Bisson’s awesomeness has been institutionally confirmed and rewarded.

Subsequent to that announcement, I have now seen at least three blog posts (librarian.net, the goblin in the library, and Thing-ology) talking about Bisson’s plan to buy LC catalog records and release them under a Creative Commons or GPL license or something similar. Here is the relevant paragraph from Open Libraries:

The revolutionary part of the announcement, however, was that Plymouth State University would use the $50,000 to purchase Library of Congress catalog records and redistribute them free under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license or GNU. OCLC has been the source for catalog records for libraries, and its license restrictions do not permit reuse or distribution. However, catalog records have been shared via Z39.50 for several years without incident.

So here is where my ignorance crops up. I simply don’t understand what is happening here. My tech services knowledge is limited, and I have never cut a check for catalog records. A few questions:

1. How can he do this? If the records don’t already have a permissive license, how can someone else decide to give them away more freely? If they are already licensed under some other scheme, isn’t this like buying a bunch of songs from iTunes and then “releasing” them under a Creative Commons license? Or, if these records aren’t covered by copyright or a restrictive license, why is this a big deal?
2. How many catalog records does $50K buy?
3. Who is likely to use the records and how? Is the idea that public libraries will grab them? Won’t they already have purchased the records they need? Or is it mainly to give innovators like Bisson some raw materials?

Please understand that I’m not trying to be cynical or even skeptical. I really just don’t understand what is going on here! So drop me an explanation or explanatory link in the comments if you can.

Chances are, once someone explains it to me, I’ll be excited, too. If Jessamyn West, Joshua Neff, and Tim Spalding think this is a good idea–not to mention Casey Bisson–I’m pretty sure I will think so too.

In other OPAC news, Library Thing impresario Tim Spalding has a nice post on Thing-ology entitled Is your OPAC fun? (a manifesto of sorts). (Don’t worry, manifesto-haters; it’s more of a party invitation than a call to the barricades).

And Tim really means fun! Not “fun” like “gee, it sure is fun to try and remember if this catalog defaults to an implied AND search or phrase searching on the keyword screen,” nor fun like “hey, look, an animated gif!” But real fun, like finding more cool stuff in the library because people recommend it, or reading reviews of stuff you didn’t know you were interested in, or taking an API and hacking some weird interface for the catalog; fun like that.

And both of those things just got me thinking about how fun it could be to design a whole library web site like that. Not just an OPAC, but a site that started from the premise that research, learning, finding interesting stuff to read and sharing what you found with others, is fun. A site where I don’t have to apologize to people for how weird it all is, and how many little places you have to look to find what you want.

It also got me thinking about what kind of user community you would need to support a library website that was more–as one commenter said on Thing-ology–more MySpace than Google. How many people would have to participate to make it a success? How could we put the “del.icio.us lesson”–that personal value precedes network value (i.e., people do stuff because it is useful to them first, and not out of some abstract idea of creating a network effect)–into practice on a library site?

Ideally, I’d have some sort of punch line here, where I had some more ideas on how to move forward. I don’t! So I’ll just say “go Casey! Go Tim!”

It would seem that I have Google bomb”>googlebombed my own catalog.

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Cowbell

Originally uploaded by Wandering Eyre.

…my OPAC needs more cowbell.

The biblioblogosphere is bringing the funny today, I’ll tell you.

Now, I wonder where I can put this image on my actual OPAC?

In The problem with the “ILS Bill of Rights”, Dan Chudnov takes ILS complainers (like me, I suppose, though his title refers back to John Blyberg’s ILS Customer Bill of Rights) to task for complaining about products from the major vendors when there is an open source ILS available in Evergreen. An excerpt:

These are our options:

• Buy a system. Negotiate the best terms you can. Enforce contracts.
• Buy a system. Live with it, happy or no.
• Hire people to build you a system. Negotiate the best terms you can. Enforce contracts.
• Hire people to build you a system. Live with it, happy or no.
• Install something Free-as-in-Speech. Negotiate support as best you can and enforce contracts.
• Install something Free-as-in-Speech. Live with it, happy or no.

That’s it. Those are the options.

“A-List”-In-Our-Dinky-Subculture-BiblioBloggers May Kvetch Daily but an entire marketful of suppliers used to clients who accept subpar products and who don’t play hardball and who don’t sue over breaches of contract is not going to suddenly implement your favorite APIs overnight

I think I understand where he is coming from. But I think the disconnect for me comes a bit earlier in his post when Chudnov writes “you can choose NOT TO BUY THE FREAKIN’ PRODUCT.”

Well, no we can’t. I sure can’t. I can’t go in and cancel my library’s contract with our vendor. I didn’t sign the original contract, and neither did my director. That decision was made at least one director ago.

And even if I could move my library over to Evergreen tomorrow I wouldn’t because I am fairly certain that such a move would torpedo my library’s participation in our state-wide lending network, which is absolutely vital to our college’s population. Which isn’t to say that Evergreen couldn’t handle such a network, as it is being developed for Georgia’s statewide library network, PINES; it just means that I’d have a whole heck of a lot of people to convince that this was a good idea.

My point is, the vendors have many of us effectively locked in. And I would hope that the options would be more than simply (a) go open source or (b) take whatever the ILS vendor dishes out.

For my part, I’d like to see librarians come together on what we really want from vendors–not feature after feature, but what environment do we want to work with. For example, I’d like to see us not ask for things like “please let us rearrange the order of the buttons on the screen,” but instead ask for valid (X)HTML/CSS templates for every screen of the OPAC with semantic markup and no presentational cruft in the HTML (no <br/> tags, no inline styles, use a <ul> when marking up a list, etc.). No doubt there are more important things to ask for on the database end, but my experience is with the web design part.

In the meantime, what? For my part, I plan to keep up with ideas and discussions about the future of the catalog on NGC4lib; keep working on the catalog I have to try and make it work better for our college; try to remember to watch my language and remember my audience, because saying that things “suck” isn’t always the best way to get taken seriously; keep up with open source developments like Evergreen and talk them up whenever possible; and try and keep the pressure on my ILS vendor for meaningful change along the lines of, yes, the ILS Bill of Rights.

Note: I had the stub of a post in my long queue entitled “DChud is the man”; seems like a good time to dust it off and post it. So here is a bonus post:

DChud is the man

I admit that most of the time I have no idea what Dan Chudnov is talking about at One Big Library. I don’t really understand the significance of his projects unalog or unapi (though I plan to spend a little more time trying to understand soon).

But when Chudnov (or “dchud” as he calls himself) writes about the big picture, I tend to read and re-read his posts. If you haven’t read his blog, take a look at these posts:

• Because this is the business we’ve chosen
• Software, simplicity, and the librarian’s corner case conundrum
• The greedy librarian moonshot
• Talk: Social Computing and Libraries

Technorati tags: opac, library, catalog, open_source, put_up_or_shut_up

You can put it on your blog, or the home page of your institution (your director will never notice). Link it to your catalog, as I have above.

Inspired, I created a companion button:

I linked that one to KGS’s OPAC checklist of shame, but you could link it to your vendor’s site…

Technorati tags: opac, library, flair

The Innovative Users Group (IUG)–for libraries using Innovative Interfaces Inc.‘s (III) integrated library system–meets in Denver starting today. I’ll be there on Sunday, and am looking forward to hearing Casey Bisson talk about his > Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0″>Web 2.0 catalog, and generally trying to learn more about designing less-sucky front ends for Innovative catalogs.

I also want to try and learn a bit more about the enhancement request procedure. The preliminary ballot for enhancement requests is out. It is marked “confidential information for customers of Innovative only,” so I can’t quote it here without checking that everyone knows the secret handshake. I don’t think I’m divulging any trade secrets if I say that it seems to be missing the forest for the trees: why request the ability to make this or that minor change on the search results screens, when what we should be asking for (IMHO) is for fully-editable templates for those pages? How about asking for valid XHTML pages? But I’m a newbie in this group, so I’ll try to avoid acting like a know-it-all jackass. There may be a perfectly good reason for this approach.

Our catalog redesign

A few months ago, I led a group here at my library to redesign our catalog, TIGER. I planned to blog about it at the time, but was a little discouraged when I realized that I had broken a few of the forms, causing us to have to revert those few pages to our old version. It wasn’t a big disaster, and I generally behaved in accordance with Dorothea Salo’s recent advice on TechEssence.info on how to fail gracefully (my favorite quote from that post: “It’s okay to say ‘wow, I completely didn’t expect it to die like that!’”), but I wan’t up for celebrating.

Plus this is very much a lipstick-on-a-pig redesign. It’s still the same old OPAC underneath, even though it has CSS formatting and most of the search pages validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

I did try an add a few grace notes to the catalog, including Web 2.0-style big fonts on the search boxes and highlighting the location, call number and status on item screens, as the usability testing I did on our catalog last summer showed me that students would find the correct item in the catalog, but not notice where it was located or if it was already checked out (I haven’t done another round of testing yet to see if my highlighting helped at all).

But anyway, I’ll be at the IUG thing on Sunday, so if you will be, too, let me know in the comments and we can try and meet up if you want.

Tags:
library, catalog, OPAC, denver, iug, iii

So here is a a little quiz: nine classic (or at least well-known) works of world literature, as described in library catalogs’ subject headings and genre terms. First one to get all nine correct in the comments wins a free lifetime subscription to See Also.

(I suppose I should add a spoiler warning, as one of these gives away the ending of the novel in the subject headings! Also, I expect I’m not the first person to find this funny; if you know of similar pages/quizzes, please let me know.)

Edited to add: if you have other funny examples, please put them in the comments.

1. • Whaling ships — Fiction
   • Ship captains — Fiction
   • Mentally ill — Fiction
   • Whaling — Fiction
   • Whales — Fiction
2. • Runaway teenagers — Fiction
   • New York (N.Y.) — Fiction
   • Bildungsromans
3. • Middle aged men — Fiction
   • Girls — Fiction
   • Erotic fiction
   • Love stories
4. • Physicians’ spouses — Fiction
   • Adultery — Fiction
   • Suicide victims — Fiction
   • Middle class — Fiction
   • France — Fiction
   • Domestic fiction
5. • Paris (France) — History — 1789-1799 — Fiction
   • London (England) — History — 18th century — Fiction
   • Paris (France) — History — 1789-1799 — Fiction
   • London (England) — History — 18th century — Fiction
   • Historical fiction
   • War stories
6. • Computer hackers — Fiction
   • Business intelligence — Fiction
   • Information superhighway — Fiction
   • Nervous system — Wounds and injuries — Fiction
   • Conspiracies — Fiction
   • Japan — Fiction
   • Science fiction
7. • Cowboys — California — Salinas River Valley — Fiction.
   • Men — California — Salinas River Valley — Fiction.
   • Friendship — Fiction.
8. • Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc. — Fiction
   • Regression (Psychology) — Fiction
   • Islands — Fiction
   • Boys — Fiction
   • Psychological fiction
9. • Rabbits — England — Fiction.
   • Community power — Fiction.
   • Allegories.