Thanks to everyone who came and especially everyone who presented ideas last Thursday! We got some good discussion going on, including:
Social discovery and books
In Google Book Search you can create your own booklist. Has social aspects eg sharing, tagging. OPL catalogue is based around users not books, with My Account at left, then lists. Users can talk to each other about books.
Automated storage and retrieval systems in libraries
Until everything’s digitised (in 30 years???) we still need to store books. Automated systems can pack books by size, which makes it much cheaper. Videos available on Q:\Blue_sky_forums\Vids
Te Ara Tika – Maori Subject Headings
Informative and challenging document. We heard a few excerpts eg Maori want to type in a Maori term and not get nothing. A lot of stuff classified under “Myths and legends” isn’t just myths and legends, it’s whakapapa. Many other examples of topics being classified from an English point of view not a Maori point of view. Headings like “Maori education” is ambiguous — is this teaching Maori students, teaching Maori language, Maori style of teaching…? (pdf at Q:\Blue_sky_forums\Te_Ara_Tika_Guiding_Words.pdf)
Ariana’s visit to Basque libraries in Spain
Ariana went to Basque country. Networked to get contacts there — asked on Te Ropu Whakahau, which got her contacts with the American Library Association, who got her contacts in Spain, who got her contacts in the area she was visiting: value from professional networking!
Library involved in community eg concert of traditional improvised singing followed by dinner and a “jam session”.
Video tours/tutorials
Personal and friendly videos. Person fronting it doesn’t look like a librarian. (Used a greenscreen – our 2nd year film students could do this; very easily produced in-house!) videos etc available here
Google Books vs Library catalogue
Study at Buffalo uni showed 18% of searches on their catalogue were getting 0 results. “secrecy government zealand” on UC catalogue gets 0 results; on Google Books it gets 766 – the top few are good ones and some of these are even in our catalogue! Google is doing relevancy ranking really well and making it an important issue. (article here) We also discussed advantages of getting external websites to link to library resources (eg Rutherford collection) and of linking from library pages to useful external websites (so we’re a useful one-stop shop and people come to us first).
LibGuides
Very brief demonstration (see demo site for links). Basically it’s a replacement for subject guides – makes it easy to build and maintain them, looks good, can embed Meebo widgets, add polls, get comments from users, include RSS feeds for tables of contents, etc – basically making it more interactive.
General discussion
Some things we discussed included the value of meeting other library staff outside our own teams in forums like this one. We talked about “risk culture” and conservatism in the face of cute videos like the ones above.
Ideas for future Blue Skies topics
* “How we use our spaces”
* looking at the Karen Access Grid
* exploring the idea of video tours/tutorials – finding out if these have been successful elsewhere; finding out what our own students think of the idea.
A suggestion of moving Blue Skies forums around the branches was well-received.
Any other ideas, musings, etc, are most welcome in comments below!
Deborah
Re google books:Unfortunately unless we could actually scan the entire book we are never going to be able to find books on our catalogue using words that don’t appear in the title or in a contents or abstract sort of note. A much higher percentage of our records now at least have contents notes which can be useful if doing a global keyword search.
As an aside lots of the books on google search are only snippets because of copyright issues. While you might find the book on the database (which may by exciting for the user) they will then be disappointed when they can’t actually read it. More importantly surely users want to get their hands on a copy. On google books if you click on "Find this book in a library" it searches Worldcat which shows NZ libraries that hold it and you get back to our catalogue. There is more to making a book accessible than finding it listed on Google Books.
Alison W
I think the Google Books-WorldCat link will be interesting to follow. It can be a bit hidden for some books but I wonder if libraries (collectively) might push/pay to make it more prominent.
I think the BISON study itself is too quantitative to be of great value, as far as all of the charts and numbers go.
The thing that intrigued me most was comparing some of the google books results to the message our catalogue gives users at present. And this might change too, I hope. The current ‘warning’ message looks a bit comical these days.
"Sorry, could not find anything matching government secrecy zealand [edit search]
Warning:
Check your spelling"
Dave Clemens
We are able to add Google Books to 360 Link (Article Linker). May be something to think about.
What does it give you … "Google books provides detailed information about books in print, including previews, tables of content, and in some cases, full copies of books."–Blurb.
Re librarians pushing stuff, I think we should push WorldCat itself; something provided by librarians for librarians, rather than Google that tries to get everything from libraries for its own benefit! WC adds Library 2.0 features to searching for books and linking to other libraries. Have a look – you’ll be surprised what you can do http://www.worldcat.org/
Deirdre
Another of the things raised in the Te Ara Tika document was the 20% rule for applying subject headings. There are many very valuable bits in books pertinent to Maori that don’t reach the 20% threshhold. This is where user-created tags could be incredibly useful, pointing the way to these valuable bits.
Worldcat is too slow to be of any use at the moment. Maybe this will change when they get taken over by Google?
Helen Kissell mentions that the author of "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" is going to be on Kim Hill tomorrow in case anyone’s interested.
Deborah
Walt Crawford surveys some open ebook options in this Cites and Insites article.
http://citesandinsights.inf…
Looks quite useful at first view.
Dave C.