Talis Insight 07 Conference - Dave Pattern - OPAC 2.0: Teaching the Pig to Sing

Dave is someone I've been keeping an eye on for a while with some really clever, innovative work at the University of Huddersfield.

The 'Does your OPAC suck?' meme has been bouncing around the blogsphere for some time now, with server reports on user disengagement with libraries and the emergence of web 2.0 introducing a richer online experience.

A survey received over 700 responses with results and analysis here: http://www.daveyp.com/blog/index.php/archives/239/

Dave then started to look at how people were using Huddersfield's OPAC. he combined this with user suggestions from surveys, 2.0 inspired features and borrowing ideas from other websites to create a 'perpetual beta' OPAC where features are launched with low/no publicity and monitored. The most critical feature of this was that it required a staff buy-in and a willingness to take risks.

He started by monitoring keyword searches and discovered 1 in 4 gave zero results, most OPACs presented users with a dead end, unlike good search engines which gave 'Did you mean?' replies. Many users just walked away. They already had a spell-check, but this didn't allow for searches which were e.g. too specific. They cross-referenced keywords with answers.com to provide new suggestions. He discovered that hyperlinked terms in wikepedia make good keywords producing serendipitous searches.

The next stage was mining the data in circulation statistics to produce links to 'people who borrowed this also borrowed' titles. As for introducing user-created content, he started with ratings first then comments (which are more popular with staff than students). Neither were promoted but have some use, comments are moderated by Dave (they allow anonymous posting).

The most popular service spellchecking. The 'also borrowed' functionality has increased in popularity by 300-400% since it was launched. Users seem to be browsing more.

There were major issues around staff acceptance

There was no formal process for discussing and agreeing new OPAC features, so the organised a web 2.00 afternoon.

There was initial scepticism from staff

• would students think the 'also borrowed' link were formal recommendation?
• would sudden changes confuse users?

The solutions were to:

• encourage suggestions from staff
• include users in decision-making
• encourage play & experimentation
• don't be afraid of mistakes
• look around for ideas
• build crappy prototypes fast
• monitor usage - if poor then remove it.

He then demonstrated some ideas in visualisation and some of the 'next generation' discovery tools out there (see the LibraryShed for details)

Daves shopping list of Library 2.0 features included

• spell checking
• relevancy ranking
• recommendations (manual and automatically generated)
• improved serendipity
• user participation

In general it rakes 2 years to library acceptance, results from his survey indicate that the US is some way ahead of the UK

Dave's full presentaion on slideshare

Talis Insight 07 Conference - Ken Chad - Scanning the LMS Market in the UK

Thought provoking scan of the current and potential future state of the UK market.

The public library market is worth £20m annually, 4 vendors have 80% of the business.

In HE 4 vendors have 87% of the market (Ex-Libris, Talis & SirsiDynix have 23% each, Innovative 18%)

These figures indicate an mature market. A potential new player in the public sector is Civica, while OCLC now own a significant number of for-profit companies.

The emergence of Private Equity Partners in the market could have significant effects. As a rule of thumb, PEPs look for companies that will offer growth within 5 years looking for opportunities in acquisition, new geographies/sectors, and new technology driven opportunities. [We've seen this in the library market - LC] Typically they will own a company for 5-7 years.

The public library sector is under pressure to look towards integration to provide savings e.g. Leeds saving £10k/year by integrating e-invoicing and finance systems.

As well as PEPs companies such as Google, AbeBooks, Amazon and LibraryThing are now offering services which compete with libraries.

An example of how books might change The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom which is a freely available PDF where comment and related material is collated into a wiki.

Talis Insight 07 Conference - Peter Godwin - From Google to YouTube to SecondLife: The Challenge to Information Literacy

A lively session, lots of slides, videos and audience interaction.

Some key concepts:

The content has left the container.

Research (in the library) is now self-directed, non-linear and based on trial and error.

Cut and paste culture rather than Read and Digest.

Authority is less clear cut - we need new metrics of assessment.

Information literacy should not be considered a given.

Some potentialities:

Working with students on Youtube

Using tagging to help students to think of keywords

From Library Videos - the best of

Conveniently located next to the stapler ... The Otis Library Tour

Talis Insight 07 Conference - Andy Latham - The Elegance Of Integrated Services

Since the earlier session overran I missed the beginning of this. It covered how Queens University Belfast were using Talis Keystone to integrate the library with university-wide business processes. They have used Keystone to integrate with their (Sharepoint) portal

Some interesting points from their policies:

NHS staff users are added into the University directory in order to integrate identity management.

They no longer loan to users with any outstanding fines, so to make payments as easy as possible they use worldpay for credit card payments, min £5 and has to be full payment, but are looking to smartcards for the future.

This required a lot of co-operation between the library, IT and Finance departments (as well as Talis)