Stuck on a train

The joys of free wifi slightly make up for the fact that I’m stuck on a train that’s going nowhere fast — the East Coast main line is suffering long delays due to the train which was ahead of mine managing to damage and bring down the overhead power lines :-S
Today was the first meeting for the JISC Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 and the e-Framework (TILE), held at the impressive LSE Library in London.
I’m still not 100% sure what the TILE Project will manage to achieve, but it was great to spend 4 hours in a room full of people who are keen to liberate and share library data, primarily for the benefit of our users.
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Wow!

Kudos to everyone at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada — in under 30 days, they’ve migrated from their legacy ILS to the Open Source Evergreen system!
One quote on Mark’s blog really jumped out at me:

This is a “skunkworks” planning process: as we progress we figure out how stuff will work and then we make it so. If we can’t make it so, we move back the appropriate number of steps until we have something that works and gives us a reasonable path to a better outcome. Much different than the normal process – the big advantage is we get used to solving problems and making accommodation, rather than striving for perfection at every turn. In this Web 2.0 world this is the way to grow. The disadvantage is that we could create configurations that will need to be changed down the road and could lead to some additional work/headaches down the road. We hope not, but working in this mode always creates that risk.

(via Lorcan Dempsey)

HighBeam Research, anyone?

Just wondering if anyone out there has a HighBeam Research account? If so, is there any chance you could look up the following article for me (pretty please!)…
A quartet that was just briefly a trio!
…I’ve absolutely no idea why the Huddersfield Examiner would want to reprint a 14 year old photograph of the band I used to be in …unless it was a very slow news day!!!
I can vaguely remember having to jump on the bus to Huddersfield after work (I used to work at the old Tesco supermarket in Brighouse) to have that photograph taken with Simon and Matthew — it was taken in the original Beaumont Street recording studio.
Douglas Thomson (the pop writer for the Examiner) seemed to like us and wrote several flattering articles:
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Before RSS…

Have you ever wanted to monitor up to 20 different things at the same time? Looking for a response time of just 3 milliseconds? Need the flexibility of portable or rack mounts? If so, you need the Gulton Techno-rite TR-9020!
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Bryony thoughtfully threw a withdrawn copy of the 1970 publication “Computer Technology for Textiles” my way. It’s a cornucopia of nerds trying to impress ladies by playing with knobs…
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…consultants pointing at things…
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…lady geeks (geekettes?) with fab hairstyles…
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…and loads and loads of tape based storage…
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…you can find the rest of the images in this Flickr set.

Where did all the books go?

The University of Hudderfield Library is entering into the 2nd phase of a 3 year refurbishment. Last year, it was the entrance floor, and this year it’s the two subject floors above. Floor 5 is already cleared of stock, and floor 6 will be empty by the end of next week.
I couldn’t resist spending a few minutes wandering around the deserted floor 5 this afternoon. Most times of the year, it’s a vibrant and busy subject floor — today is was eiree and desolate. With the shelving and staff gone, you get a real sense of the space and size…
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The floor of the former PC room is dotted with circular patches where the culmulative effect of hundreds of students on PC swivel chairs has gradually worn away the carpet. It’s like something out of a sci-fi film where people get zapped and turned into a small round pile of ash 😉
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You can find the rest of the photos here.
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2008 — The Year of Making Your Data Work Harder

Quite a few of the conversations I’ve had this year at conferences and exhibitions have been about making data work harder (it’s also one of the themes in the JISC “Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 and the E-framework” study). We’ve had circ driven borrowing suggestions on our OPAC since 2005 (were we the first library to do this?) and, more recently, we’ve used our log of keyword searches to generate keyword combination suggestions.
However, I feel like this is really just the tip of the iceberg — I’m sure we can make our data work even harder for both us (as a library) and our users. I think the last two times I’ve spoken to Ken Chad, we’ve talked about a Utopian vision of the future where libraries share and aggregate usage data 😀
There’s been a timely discussion on the NGC4Lib mailing list about data and borrower privacy. In some ways, privacy is a red herring — data about a specific individual is really only of value to that individual, whereas aggregated data (where trends become apparent and individual whims disappear) becomes useful to everyone. As Edward Corrado points out, there are ways of ensuring patron privacy whilst still allowing data mining to occur.
Anyway, the NGC4Lib posts spurred me on into finishing off some code primarily designed for our new Student Portal — course specific new book list RSS feeds.
The way we used to do new books was torturous… I’ve thankfully blanked most of it out of my memory now, but it involved fund codes, book budgets, Word marcos, Excel and Borland Reportsmith. The way we’re trying it now is to mine our circulation data to find out what students on each course actually borrow, and use that to narrow down the Dewey ranges that will be of most interest to them.
The “big win” is that our Subject Librarians haven’t had to waste time providing me with lists of ranges for each course (and with 100 or so courses per School, that might takes weeks). I guess the $64,000 question is would they have provided me with the same Dewey ranges as the data mining did?
The code is “beta”, but looks to be generating good results — you can find all of the feeds in this directory: https://library.hud.ac.uk/data/rss/courses/
If you’d like some quick examples, then try these:

Is your data working hard enough for you and your users? If not, why not?

quick conference summary

Graham and Ian have already said many of the things I was planning to say, so just a quickie blog post and I’ll try and add more later…
A big “thank you” to everyone who was involved in organising the conference — I think it’s safe to say it was a huge success. A huge amount of face-to-face “social networking” went on, which partly explains why I didn’t have time to blog anything!
I’m sure I read a blog post/comment from Stephen Abram that Enterprise wasn’t going to be an OPAC bolt-on front-end (like Primo, Endeca, AquaBrowser, VuFind, etc), but that’s certainly how it was pitched at the conference. One question I was planning to ask, but forgot, was whether or not the relevancy ranking algorithm would be tweakable — the demo threw up some iffy results (e.g. a search for “dogs” ranked a book that didn’t contain the keyword anywhere in the title/author/summary higher than other books that did). Being able to give certain MARC fields a higher priority for relevancy ranking is a “must”.
Keynote speaker Sue McKnight was extremely quotable, and here are a few of my scribbled bullet point notes from her session:

  • “we need to adapt to the digital mindset”
  • don’t give stuff sexy/trendy names — if it’s a information desk, then all it an “information desk”
  • we need to be creating the future and not be the victims of change
  • “…Shibboleth?! Bloody Hell!!!”
  • “become a change junkie”
  • “the status quo isn’t an option”

Ever since seeing Helene Blowers present, I’ve watched what presenters do with their hands (Helene is very kinetic and is almost impossible to photograph). CODI President Amy Terlaga must be double-jointed, as I certainly can’t do this with my thumbs (I tried, and it hurt!)
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As Ian has already mentioned, the news about Horizon 7.4.x in the UK was extremely disappointing.
The two User Groups decided to combine, but decided to take a vote on what their new name should be. As soon as the name is chosen, I’ll rebrand the DUG Wiki (https://library.hud.ac.uk/dug). I’ll also be adding the presentations to the wiki (as soon as I’ve got permission from each presenter).
The plan is to put together a registration page for the new User Group that will:
1) register your organisation as a member
2) set you up with a wiki account (so you can edit the pages)
3) let you vote for the new name for the group
We’re also planning to look at chat technologies to help move away from face-to-face meetings, which are always difficult for non-UK members to attend.
So, keep a close eye on the wiki for further info!
I’ve also finished uploading all of my conference photos to Flickr
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Southampton – day one

The presentations for day one of the conference have drawn to a close and there’s only time for a quick blog post before we all head off for an evening of nautical fun and frolics on the “Three Rivers Cruise”. Cross your fingers no-one falls overboard!
Unfortunately, for “personal reasons”, CEO Gary Rautenstrauch isn’t at the conference, which is a shame.
The opening keynote by Keith Sturges talked about the continuing change within the company (something which most customers are only too aware of) and the continuing growth of the company (16%, compared to a sector average of 8%). The SaaS (Software as a Service) model is being pushed hard, with the UK hosted solution handled by IBM in Greenock, Scotland (“the most miserable place you could ever go to”!).
I’m still sceptical of SaaS being a “must have” for UK academic libraries. There are good and valid reasons why universities would prefer to have control over their servers and IT infrastructure — integration with other systems being a key one.
Next up, Kevin Rushbridge (Project Co-ordinator for the Swift Consortium) talked about the state wide consortia model set up in Victoria, Australia. I thoroughly interesting presentation — I think Kevin is speaking at a CILIP event soon? If so, he’s well worth going to see. I was tempted to put my hand up at the end and ask “did you consider Open Source?”, but manged to resist.
After the afternoon break, Talin Bingham (Chief Technology Officer) presented the Symphony product roadmap. As reported elsewhere, Enterprise is the upgrade path from EPS/Rooms and e-Library is the replacement OPAC for iBistro/iLink.
The big news from Talin is that Microsoft SQL Server 2005 will become an alternative database option for Symphony 3.3 (which is due 2009), with support for SQL Server 2008 coming afterwards.
One thing that’s always bugged me about iLink/iBistro is that the book title isn’t a clickable link in a set of search results. In the screenshot of e-Library, it looked like that was still the case.
Talin also mentioned that URSA is continued to be developed, but without support for the British Library, it’s a product that has very little relevance to many UK libraries.
I’ve not had chance to upload images from the presentations, but there’s a clutch of photos from the registration and lunch on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/davepattern/tags/14may2008/
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