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Archive for the 'Past Conferences' Category

The Changing Federated Search Scene

ITI Bloggers April 8th, 2008

If you’ve been confused about the federated search landscape, I hope you were able to catch the presentation Monday afternoon by two experts in this area—Jeff Wisniewski of University of Pittsburgh and Frank Cervone, formerly at Northwestern University and now the director at Chicago State University. We’re in a period of rapid change and transition, moving away from discrete federated search products. Indeed, the vendor landscape has changed drastically as some have simply dropped out of the market (too hard to make money at it) and others have been acquired and merged with other products.

Here are some of the key trends the two outlined.
The number of choices from commercial vendors is rapidly shrinking (not much diversity of choice) while open source options are increasing.
We’re seeing progress on the standards front (‘nuff said on that).
We’re seeing increasing use of visualization features in some of the products, which provide users with more entry points to content.
We’re seeing movements toward more holistic content discovers. Federated search is becoming one module of larger efforts to integrate all content into a single discovery tool. Today’s Track A will continue this line of thought in looking at some of the next-gen library interfaces.
And, we’re seeing more affordable turnkey solutions being offered, with greater possibilities for off-site hosting and SaaS.

Paula J. Hane
News Bureau Chief, ITI


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How Students Do Research

ITI Bloggers April 7th, 2008

When I hear the term "native habitat" I usually think of animals, not college students. Tho some might argue that they can be one in the same… Regardless, the talk "What Do Users Really Do in their Native Habitat?", which featured two different studies on how students do their research, was interesting and enlightening. Both studies (one from the University of Guelph and one by ProQuest) found similar results.
Among the many findings was this one from Guelph: Students wanted librarians to fix the research services they already had before offering new ones. (In this case "fix" usually meant "make it more user-friendly.") Pascal Lupien said of that message, "It sounds kind of obvious, but that’s not how it usually happens."
John Law discussed the ProQuest study, which revealed that one great way to get students to understand the resources and to use the appropriate ones for their assignments was to have instructions give them names of resources to use. That, Law said, was the "golden endorsement" that helped them do good research.
To share and learn from these study results, watch for them to appear online. You can server your students much better by asking what they want rather than assuming you already know!
~Kathy Dempsey
Editor, Marketing Library Services newsletter


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Happy Exhibitors at Opening Reception

ITI Bloggers April 7th, 2008

The opening reception in the Exhibit Hall was very well attended, making most of the exhibitors very happy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author book signing at the ITI booth

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and CIL 2008 Blog Coordinator


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Overflow Crowd Hears Tennant on UGC

ITI Bloggers April 7th, 2008

 An overflow crowd (including an overflow of the overflow room!) turned out to hear Roy Tennant of OCLC on User Generated Content (UGC) in libraries.  Tennant said that UGC comes in two flavors:  "real" content (documents, photos, etc.) and "descriptive" content (tags, descriptions,  ratings, etc.).  UGC is becoming more widespread in libraries as the realization grows that more content is better because it can help them provide more personalized service.

Tennant pointed to kete.net.nz, a New Zealand community repository as a good example of UGC.  The site was envisioned as a genealogical repository as well as a digitization of the Cyclopedia of New Zealand, but the tone of the site quickly changed as advertising (houses for sale and professional services) began to appear on it.  Other UGC sites offer a chance to tap into the knowledge of the community to supply missing data (for example, the Halton Hills Library in Ontario was able to identify some sailors in a photograph based on input by a user).

Perhaps the most well known of the recent UGC projects is that of the Library of Congress which put 3,000 photos on Flickr.  The experiment was hugely successful; there were 5.5 million views of the content in the first month and 10,000 unique tags were generated by users. Over 3,500 comments were posted by 1,400 users, and from these, 68 records were enhanced or corrected.  Through this experiment, the Library achieved a higher profile for its collection, community engagement, corrections and additions to the metadata, and sparked some discussion by users relating to the photos.

A number of third-party providers are entering the UGC space,  including Springshare, LibraryThing for libraries, and ChiliFresh.  Tennant said that this shows that UGC has an interesting future, and librarians must be aware of several issues:

  • Our idea of content may not be the same as the users.
  • The tagging will be messy, but that’s OK.
  • There are ways to increase effectiveness through intelligent usage.
  • Libraries need to set goals for UGC and make sure that they can deploy staff effectively to manage them.
  • Will it be necessary to moderate the content?
  • Is the potential impact worth the investment?

Tennant concluded that UGC offers libraries a great potential for content and service enhancement.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and CIL 2008 Blog Coordinator


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Mobile Trends

ITI Bloggers April 7th, 2008

If you want a quick case of information overload, just go and listen to a presentation by Megan Fox, Web & Electronic Resources Librarian at Simmons College. She is an expert on mobile platforms and trends, and that’s an exciting and fast moving field, indeed. There are now three times as many mobile phones as TVs in the US, and many people say that it would be extremely difficult to give up their mobile phone.   The future of mobile devices is very bright, and it has been greatly enhanced by Apple’s iPhone. 
 
The iPhone has radically changed the market, and it has brought many new online users into the market. It has high quality audio and sports a new user interface that responds to gestures or hand motions. It can even sense the orientation in which it is being held and change the screen orientation accordingly. The iPhone is the first in a whole new generation of mobile devices. 
 
Many mobile devices incorporate a wealth of new features, such as keyboards, larger screens, voice recognition, improved cameras, and video. Battery life is also being improved. New GPS features allow users to take a picture and then receive more information on the subject of the picture. And 2 dimensional barcodes
(such as those on the back of CIL attendee badges)
will be able to hold a greatly increased amount of information. 
 
Web content is increasingly being optimized for viewing on small screens, and there is even a new domain, .mobi, for this kind of content. Services such as skweezer and Google’s Web Toolkit can automatically transcode content (i.e. repurpose it for mobile platforms). Find.mobi is a directory service to find transcoded websites. 
 
Text messaging applications are becoming more popular. “Text friendly” buttons similar to “print friendly” are starting to appear on many websites. You can now make purchases from Amazon using text messaging, and in Japan, gift certificates are sent by text messaging. Search results can be sent to mobile phones as text messages. 

Fortunately, Megan will shortly be making her slides available on her web site, so that you can explore the exciting details about these new advances in mobile platforms.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today, and CIL 2008 Blog Coordinator


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Digital Convergence

ITI Bloggers April 7th, 2008

I was interested in Beth Gallaway’s talk on digital convergence. She defined it as everything talking to everything else—phone, browser, phone, and IM. Digital convergence happens because of widgets, which are small external applications inserted into web pages. Some examples are iGoogle, a personalized web portal; MeeboMe, which allows all IM accounts to talk to one another; and Twitter Badges.
 
Widgets are becoming popular because we are getting lazy—even a single click is one too many! And standards have been set for cross-platform communication. You don’t need to know any code to put a widget on your web page—if you can cut and paste, you can do it. It won’t be long before every web page has one or more widgets on it. There is a huge opportunity for using widgets for instant messaging between real and virtual worlds. One library has even set up a widget to allow people to pay library fines from their Second Life account using Second Life currency!
 
You can see Beth’s slides here , and her links here.
Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and CIL 2008 Blog Coordinator


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ChaCha in Indiana

ITI Bloggers April 7th, 2008

This session is explaining the relationship between ChaCha and Indiana University (including IUPUI) to a very empty room. Speakers are Polly Boruff-Jones (IUPUI), J B Hill and Jennifer Laherty (both from IU Bloomington).  Polly explains ChaCha. ChaCha is now mobile search with a guide, as they’ve done away with guided search on the Web. J B talks about the actual deal between the univeristies and ChaCha. It seems that it’s a happy relationship - the librarians enjoy the deal because it extends libraries’ reference presence throughout the University web site and course management system and allows libraries to have an impact on campus search. ChaCha benefits by exploring new market, increase in customer base, increase in knowledge resources. Jennifer says the ChaCha architecture is web-based platform. It has authentication via CAS (Central Authentication System from Yale). Logic has ability to take infoseekers (that’s ChaCha’s term for end-users) to the guide best able to answer query. So a health question goes to the Health Center; if it’s research, it goes to the library. Now she’s got up a flowchart on the screen. Sends to best available guide, waits 3 seconds, if no answer, goes to 2nd guide, wait 2 seconds, and so on. Corporate call center technology.

Jennifer is showing search form for movies. When they started the library sent pre-vetted results to ChaCha. Apparently at IU and IUPUI, the web "search with a guide" platform still exists. She’s now showing the guides’ screen. In theory, the system relies on the Knowledge Base and adds to it as the system learns from questions asked and answered. The difference between what ChaCha can do inside the university and outside is that the librarians can access premium content databases for the academic community. Jennifer’s showing EBSCO’s Academic Premier. She can search it and show to a student in her capacity as guide.

IU is only academic partner. IU has 140 guides, will add another 20. There have been 998 session requests, there were 853 last year. Most come from IUB campus. ChaCha gives them lots of statistics, like requests per hour and ratings of the guides.

 

Marydee Ojala

Editor, ONLINE: Exploring Technology & Resources for Information Professionals


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Text Mining of Open Source

ITI Bloggers April 7th, 2008

Patrice Slert, Johns Hopkins University, is speaking on text mining open source.
 
By open source,she means structured data. She mines WebofScience, Dialog. It’s not drivers licenses, other public record sources.
 
She warns us to beware of data conclusions. How are a rooster crowing and the sun rising related? She notes that open source has grown in importance for the intelligence community. More emphasis on including librarians in the OSI community.
 
ISI WoK citation searching – ISI analysis tools let you visualize the numbers of publications by country on a particular topic, visualize by publications by institution.
 
Better she thinks is VantagePoint, which provides an import wizard tailored to various databases and lets you combine databases. INSPEC in VantagePoint has a details window feature, the citation field can be changed or additional windows added. There’s a prediction box based on algorithms. It’s got a thesaurus. There are author maps. Each node is clickable and will bring up the full citations. It interacts with Excel. Part of the author map is linkages so you know who is collaborating with whom. You can see who "lynchpin" person is. You can create a co-occurrence matrix to see how different fields relate to each other.
 
Silobreaker lets you mine the news. It’s very big in the intelligence community. You can do word searches, visual searches, geographic searches. Lets you find networks of people, organizations, companies, industries, key phrases. She’s demo-ing Silobreaker.
Marydee Ojala
 
 
 


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Fox on Mobile Device Developments

ITI Bloggers April 7th, 2008

Megan Fox is running through recent developments in mobile technology. Too many to capture (she did warn us she speaks very quickly), so here are just a few high points. Mobile devices are widespread and people use them for all kinds of things other than phone calls. One device is sold with matching nail polish. You can navigate on some devices using gestures, Tilt the screen to scroll down. New bar codes are two dimensional. On a personal note, I do wish people would pronounce Nokia properly – all Finnish words have the accent on the first syllable. It’s NO keea.
 
Now she’s moving on to mobile web. Access to content delivered over web. There will be content born mobile. There’s an important suffix (.mob).
Transcoded web lets you look at almost any web page on your mobile screen. It does a "good enough" job. Cool tools for transcoding such as esyurl, let you make a tinyurl and determine if it needs to be transcoded. Mowser and Opera Mini are browsers for mobiles. Tiles are mini previews of content. TeaShark, Skyfox, Netfront are other mobile browsers with previews and zoom. Mozilla’s working on this.
 
Information now available on handheld – USA.gov, biography.com, major league baseball, history.com, measurements.mobi, trapster.com (speed trap on highways), dictionary.com, Melissa data, Hoover’s. PressReader for Windows Mobile. Library vendors, such as EBSCO, talking about mobile content but don’t intend to develop it themselves. Hmm, she just mentioned recipes on your mobile. There’s an interesting thought. It would actually help when grocery shopping.
 
Britannica Mobile for iPhone, news outlets are also delivering content to small screens.
 
Audio and textual ebooks have been developed for iPhones, Blackberries. Audible Air was purchased by Amazon. Public library with .mobi. What would a mobile user want? Library hours, upcoming events. What are ILS companies doing?
 
Multimedia has taken over from podcasts. Tech blogs are replete with embedded videos. Microsoft Silverlight. You can get TV on your mobile. Over 25 channels.
 
Web searching on your mobile: Google Yahoo – use them for ready reference. User wants facts and answers, not list of web sites. There’s also text searching. Text to Google, Yahoo, Live (wish she’d mentioned ChaCha). Now she’s talking about 4info. Diet.com has nutrition on the go, which tells you nutritional content of fast food. Simmons Library uses texting. You can integrate SMS with email. Other tools include Google Gears brings cloud computing to your desktop, task manager Remember the Milk.
 
What’s next?? Changes in printed word fueled by epaper. Phones will be able to project movies, PPTs. Sunglasses that you plug into your iPod and watch movies. Look at Microsoft Surface project (I saw that demonstrated at NFAIS last month).
Slides will be at Web.simmons.edu/~fox/mobile
 
There’s laptops open all over this room but very few people are taking notes on their mobile device.
Marydee Ojala


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Info on the Go

ITI Bloggers April 7th, 2008

On Monday morning, two high energy and obviously gadget-loving individuals gave a fast-paced look at the latest mobile search providers and application. The dynamic duo of Gary Price and Megan Fox talked about many of the new “answer engines” for mobile devices—the object is to provide users with answers instead of lists of links.

Many of the new options use the camera feature on a phone to initiate a search. For example, point the camera phone to a street sign and find businesses, restaurants, etc. nearby. It gets around the problem of trying to type on the little gadgets. Other options involve speech-activated searching. Location-based search uses either GPS or WiFi to determine a user’s location and bring back information. And, there’s socially-assisted search that harnesses the popularity of results from other users.

Librarians should see these mobile applications as another way to deliver information to users—another set of tools we need to know and then educate our users about the possibilities. Megan said that slides and links for her presentation will be available at: http://web.simmons.edu/~fox/mobile.

Megan then had an afternoon session on mobile trends that I understand was a complement to the earlier presentation, focusing more on the current hardware available. I suspect the links for that will be posted as well.

Paula J. Hane

News Bureau Chief, ITI

 


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