The Denver Public Library

For this week's blog, I chose the Denver Public Library.

From examining the library homepage, I noticed that, the library appears to be very active in its community.

Additionally, I noticed on the main webpage, in addition to the date and time, users have the ability to check the local weather forecast. I thought this was a cute and unique feature.

On the left sidebar of the main page are links to a Kids page, a Teens page, and a page for Spanish language. The Kids and Teens pages are geared specifically for those age groups, and offer an assortment of activities and resources.

On the right sidebar is a Live News Feed, which shows an assortment of headlines from various news agencies. Users have the option to subscribe to the library’s RSS Feeds, which includes book reviews, library podcasts, the library newsletter, and more.

The library also offers an Ask the Librarian service 24/7. Users can chat online with a librarian and get an answer to their question any time of day.

Also within the left sidebar are various helpful links, including Research Resources, Denver Public Library Downloads, Events and Classes, and About the Library. I found the About the Library page to be a complete wealth of information. It covered everything from Budget Information, the history of the library, Dewey Decimal guide, to the Collection Development Policy and the organizational structure of the library, and much more! From one of the information sources on this page, I discovered that the library employs 500 people, and altogether the staff speaks 11 languages. I’m very curious to know what those languages happen to be.

This library appears to truly be an information institution. It offers a multitude of opportunities for all kinds of learning.

From the library catalog page, is a link titled “Didn’t Find It? Try This.” This directs you to a new page that shows what else you can do to locate your item. One available option is the Prospector, which is a combined catalog of over 23 Colorado and Wyoming libraries that will loan items to your local branch. Also available is a link to WorldCat, which will search a national and international catalog. The library also offers the option request the item, and states that they will do their best to either purchase or borrow the item for you. I found this to be a very pro-active and user friendly approach. I know that personally, it’s never occurred to me to actually request an item from the library if I know they don’t own it.

For all the information and services available throughout the library website, I found the actual catalog to be relatively unimpressive. The search results page is pretty plain. Looking at the full record for an item is equally basic. There don’t appear to be any special features or unique functions. The presentation is boring compared to the other OPACs I’ve looked at. But, I suppose that it serves it’s basic purpose. It gets the job done without being too flashy.

For a select few, the item full record offers links for Excerpt, Summary, or Review, as available. Some titles have all three links and some have none. The summary option, however, is just a basic one-sentence notation annotation.

One positive is that when using the author search, you can search for the author’s name in any order, which is helpful. Somehow, I typically manage to forget to enter the last name first. So, this would save me the time of having to go back and correct my search.

However, if I left the search page inactive, it would give me the message: "Your search in the DPL catalog is about to time out. Your session has been idle too long and is about to time out." If I didn’t click on the link to re-activate, after about 5 minutes it would re-direct me to the library main page, losing my search results. I’m not entirely sure why it does this. It seems a bit unnecessary, but perhaps it is trying to protect my privacy in this manner.

Overall, I enjoyed exploring the library's webpages. The library seems to be a real resource to the community. The actual OPAC isn't too fancy, but seems to meet the very basic needs of the user.

University of Texas Libraries

I will be the first to admit, I really hate the UT Libraries OPAC. From my first moments using it, I found it to be difficult to navigate, counter intuitive, and full of features I couldn't get to work properly. So I've taken this opportunity to channel my bias into what I hope is a more constructive review than my whining.

Despite it's title, the homepage for the libraries is actually just for UT Austin, not the entire system as far as I can tell. If there's a way to access sister schools directly, the link is well hidden. This is not really a big problem - Austin is certainly the flagship institution for the system, and general searches on Google for "UT" will lead one to the Austin homepage, not the system homepage. It's merely an example of the imprecision I find so objectionable about the whole library internet experience.

The UT OPAC has just as many features as any other university's. There are links on the main page for electronic reserves, for an ask a librarian instant messaging feature, for interlibrary loan requests, and of course to the library catalog itself. There's a news feed that gets it's own heading and a "featured resource" box highlighting a single feature that cycles through different articles when the page is refreshed. There are lovely pictures, and several links on the page will get you to the same place, in hopes, I think, that if one gets lost and confused, one can eventually find what one's looking for. The problem is getting to and using a lot of these resources.

The Library catalog does not have a quick search bar on the main page (only Google Scholar is afforded that honor,) but is accessible through two separate links. One is from the "Quicklinks" section, and the other from the drop down menu titled "Research Tools." In the past I have had trouble getting to the catalog, since "Research Tools" sounds like a good place to find more specialized resources, while the menu headed "Library Services" seemed to me to be a better place to have a catalog, and the text on the"Quicklinks" bar is smaller than any other link on the page and blends with the large picture next to it. Perhaps other people have been having my problem, since going to the home page now automatically opens the drop down menu for "Research Tools." The catalog itself functions very well, and like other online catalogs I've seen allows you to save searches, to search for similar entries by subject, and to view the MARC display for the selected entry.

In addition to the library catalog, the "Research Tools" menu allows you to access many other features, including an indispensable list of "Databases & Indexes to Articles" and a "Library Widgets" section, which has all the information about various library ad-ons a user can access, including NoodleBib citation manager and a Del.icio.us browser ad-on tool. It also includes a fairly prominent link labeled "Find an Article" which is perhaps the least useful function of any web page in history.

"Find an article" takes the user to MetaLib (trademark) something that claims to be able to quickly find an article using the keyword entered into the search field. There is even a button labeled "Go" which actually does absolutely nothing when pressed, other than inform the user that they need to select a "database set" from the options underneath the search bar. These database sets take one through another series of click-throughs, eventually resulting in the search page for an individual database, and not the results for any terms the user might have entered in the original search box. In order to actually get things to (sort of) work the way they appear to, one has to click on the little UT symbol that appears next to the database names, this will allow one to log in and search with the search bar. No explanation is given for this process. This makes the whole process unintuitive, annoying and completely superfluous, since one can access a much wider range of databases by using the "Databases & Indexes" option I mentioned earlier.

The other big problem the site has is the constant need to enter and reenter a UTdirect id and password when accessing the site from off campus. This makes a certain amount of sense for accessing electronic resources, which are subject to copyright, but makes considerably less sense when accessing the "IM a Librarian" feature. While this is not a public library, it seems incredible to me that they would ban the public from asking questions of the librarians, especially since it's possible for nearly anyone to contact the library staff via email, and of course in person.

I have successfully used this OPAC on many, many occasions, often from off campus. But it has nearly always seemed to me to be far more trouble than it should be, and often a complete failure from a usability standpoint. I understand that this is a fairly new redesign of the site, but I trust I'm not alone in thinking they could have done more user testing prior to it's release. Surely I'm not the only person that accesses it from home and not a school computer.

The Mariner's Museum

The OPAC of the library of the Mariner's Museum in Newport News, Virginia, is directed toward those seeking information involving the sea and maritime pursuits. This library contains data about everything from how the Native Americans used the ocean to survive to the use of modern day ships. Although this website makes it clear that this library is extensive, the majority of the collection is not yet available through the OPAC. The museum is in the process of putting the information they have available in the library online.

The website for the library gives users an idea of the scope of the collection, topics covered, types of materials available, and special collections available. However, currently there is no unified way to search all of the material available. This OPAC is better if used when searching for a specific document. For instance, if you are looking for the passenger list from when your great-grandparents came to America on the steamship Catalonia you would simply go to the Passenger List Catalog and it would tell you precisely where to find the passenger list. Or if you are looking for the papers of Henry Eaton Coleman you would go the Special Collections and find a finding aid, inventory, and scope and content note (note: much of the collections' information has not yet been input into the catalog, only the name of the specific collections).

However, if a person is simply browsing the Library Catalog is not very useful. For one thing this catalog only contains books and journals. Others types of materials such as manuscripts and photographs are contained within their own separate catalog and must be searched separately. For instance if a person were researching clipper ships, he or she would have to search the library catalog for general information about clipper ships, they would then have to search the special collections catalog if perhaps they were interested in the daily diary of a clipper ship captain, and then they would have to search the image catalog for a photo/drawing/painting of a clipper ship. I am no expert but I would think the various catalogs could be combined in some way, or something could be developed so that the catalogs would cross-reference one another so that if someone wanted to know about clipper ships they could go to a single Library Catalog and find all of this information. Then if that person wanted to narrow the search to images only he or she could narrow the specifications within the catalog.

This Library Catalog is helpful in that there is a button to press for online help that provides step by step instructions with pictures on how to do such things as an author search or a boolean search of an OPAC for those who are not familiar with them. However, the OPAC makes the search overly complicated by forcing the user to choose one of three different ways of searching (Search, Browse, or Combination) before they are allowed to begin their search. A choice like this seems to aim at a more knowledgeable user searching the OPAC. These three choices could easily be combined into one screen and in many OPACs they are, this simplifies the options and still provides the same usability.

The library does offer assistance but this assistance also seems to be aimed at specific searches. For example, the website details that a person seeking assistance needs to have a detailed description of the information needed, for vessel requests the complete name of the boat is needed or the boat model and length, for Chris-Craft the hull number is required, and for other recreational craft the model and length of the boat are needed. These are simply the "Essential" requirements, not the mention the "Desirable" and "Highly Desirable" requirements. This does not leave much room for general searches for information.

As mentioned previously, this OPAC is still in the process of being created and it has a long way to go before it is complete. However there are many ways in which the current design of the OPAC could be changed in order to make it more accessible to users. Many people begin their searches by browsing and gradually end up searching for specific items. This OPAC does not easily allow for browsing.

OAIster

OAIster, part of the Digital Library Production Service of the University of Michigan University Library, is a catalog of academically-oriented digital materials from around the world, including digitized books and articles, born-digital texts, audio files, images, movies, datasets. OAIster compiles or "harvests" the descriptive metadata of digital materials on a weekly or monthly basis in order to aggregate these records into one repository so that they are easily searchable and findable.

The records are for freely accessible digital materials, as well as restricted-access digital materials. Data contributers must have metadata available in Dublin Core format. As of February 1, 2008, OAIster provides access to 14,900,092 records from 934 contributors.

OAIster's homepage is user-friendly and includes links for searching and how to use the system. Searching is fairly basic and straight-forward: you can search for records by title, author/creator, subject, or language, or entire record. You can also further limit your search by one more more type(s) of resource, i.e. text, image, audio, video, or dataset, and you have the option to sort your results by by title, author, date, weighted hit frequency, and hit frequency.

Once you begin a search and retrieve your results, OAIster will sort them by data contributer, i.e. from where they were harvested, and will also allow you to revise your search for fewer recrods. One weakness of their search function is that you cannot search only by resource and/or date (ex: image, 2001) -- you must include a search term or name or phrase.

OAIster treats search queries of two or more words as a phrase, and will only retrieve records which contain all of the words next to each other. They are working on an initiative to employ Google-like searching so that words entered together are searched together and separately. I think this could facilitate more access to resources and materials for people who might not know exactly what they are looking for.

OAIster attempts to provide links to all of the digital resources for which is has harvested records, along with rights and access information in the catalog record for each item. You can save a record in your bookbag so you can come back to it later. The bookbag option also allows you to email or download the record.

The major limitation to OAIster is its requirement that contributors use the Dublin Core metadata format. Despite that, I think OAIster is a useful database not just for students and scholars, but also for users who are just browsing to see what digital material is out there. This is a good start in attempting to collect information from a wide variety of institutions and archives, and I look forward to seeing how OAIster continues to develop and improve upon this goal.

Clay Shirky’s View on Community Effort, Love, and the Internet

Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” recently shared a video clip in a post entitled “Supernova Talk: The Internet Runs on Love.” The video clip is of a speech he presented at the Supernova 2007 conference. In the speech, Shirky described his belief that the future of computer software and human services lies in global collaboration on the internet.

Shirky discussed how the “love of the community” is reflected in weblogs, wikis, and list-servs that turn “love” into “renewable building material.” Shirky argues that the group “love” that has caused people in Japan to build and re-build a 300-year-old wooden shrine is the same type of love that drives the collaborative efforts of the communities that constantly refine Linux and Wikipedia. In such an environment, he argues that people should not ask “What is the business model?” for a particular software or service to determine its worth, but rather, they should ask, “Do people who like it take care of each other?”

One of Shirky’s most notable quotes from the presentation is the following: "We have always loved one another. We're human. It's something we're good at. But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that affection has been quite limited. With love alone, you can get a birthday party together. Add coordinating tools, and you can write an operating system. . . . In the past, we could do little things for love, but big things, big things required money. Now, we can do big things for love."

Shirky’s views are reminiscent of Weinberger’s discussions about “social knowing” in “Everything is Miscellaneous.” Like Weinberger, Shirky correctly observes that many aspects of the internet are challenging conventional perceptions. Indeed, who would have imagined that list-servs, wikis and blogs would so quickly begin to challenge the popularity and authority of journals and other well-established periodicals? Shirky also correctly points out the important role that passion and “love” play in the success of an endeavor. The impact of passion is evident not only in the realm of software, but in sports, politics, and almost any other area one can imagine. The Internet’s ability to bring people of similar interests together on a global scale cannot help but amplify the potential impact of passionate people.

However, Shirky’s grand vision for the transformative power of the Internet appears to overlook fundamental aspects of human nature that are important to consider in this new era, as well. One does not have to look very far to find myriad examples that contradict Shirky’s claim that loving one another is “something we’re good at.” From internet spam to computer viruses to the latest financial scandal to a disagreement among close friends, it is not difficult to see that humans struggle with loving each other. Furthermore, the software “love” that Shirky extols is often fleeting, as well. If the community’s love for a social software application like MySpace is supposed to transform it into “something stable and long-lasting,” then why are so many people switching to Facebook?

Keeping in mind the flaws, as well as the great potential, of both human nature and the Internet is important in organizing libraries and personal information. One can hope that a particular software program or organizing scheme will be respected by its users and last as long as a Japanese shrine, but one must also provide appropriate safeguards, checks and balances, and backup plans if the utopian community does not behave as it should.

San Francisco Public Library

On a whim, I chose to investigate the library website for the San Francisco Public Library system

One thing I noticed right off the bat on the homepage, users have the option of viewing the page in Spanish or Chinese. I found this to be a very helpful and thoughtful way to reach and serve a user base

The library homepage also offers Local Links- Featured San Francisco resources. This seems to be a great way to get the library patrons interested and involved in the local community

The site also includes a News link, which offers information of what’s happening at the library. Areas of interest include topics such as branch renovation and construction information, events, exhibits, and classes.

In using the librar's OPAC, the user can search by basic keyword, title, author, and subject. However, the catalog also offers searches using Publisher, ISBN/ISSN, Call Number, or Government Document Number

The search return doesn’t immediately tell you whether the item is available or not. You have to click on a link that asks “Is it available?” This directs you to a new page with a chart of all the library branches and the item status at each.

Search results displays user ratings. Patrons with a library card can rate items on a 1 to 5 stars basis. Interestingly, The Da Vinci Code received only a 2 star rating.

The search results also offers an icon to represent what form of media the item is. A search for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe returned: Book, DVD/VCD, Spoken CD, VHS Video, and Spoken Tape. By the way, the DVD/VCD item had received a 5 start rating from users. The other formats had yet to be rated.

Each item within the search results offers a thumbnail view of the item’s cover image. When you click on the thumbnail, it allows you to view a larger JPEG image.

Additionally, after selecting an item from the search results, you have the option to switch between Regular Display and MARC Display.

When I searched for the title Everything is Miscellaneous, the results page offered me the option to click on a link titled Other Resources. This directed me to a new window that offered me new links to further title searches. These new options included: Full Text Articles in Proquest, Encyclopedias like Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, Book Information in WorldCat, and seach engines like Google and Yahoo.

The results page also offered a link called Reviews and Summaries. This directed me to a new page titled Additional Information. Here, they offered additional links: Table of Contents, First Chapter or Excerpt, Summary, Cover Image, Review- Publisher’s Weekly, Review- Library Journal.

The catalog offers a drop down menu of recent search history, which was helpful when I was wanting to switch between various search results, without having to re-enter the information again.

Overall, I found this library website and OPAC to be user-friendly. The website is pleasant and helpful, and appears to be meeting the needs of its patrons. If I lived in San Francisco, I believe I would be pleased with the public library system.

Calisphere: A World of Digital Resources

As of late I have become extremely interested in the digital library world. I think it's amazing what some groups and organizations are doing to provide online access to some of the most meaningful and rare cultural, historical, and educational documents, images, and artifacts. I also am somewhat obsessed with the state of California and all the initiatives going on there, including Google (obviously) and the California Digital Library. When I went to the website for the CDL, I was introduced to a number of programs under their care, including Calisphere.


Calisphere: A World of Digital Resources is "the University of California's free public gateway to a world of primary sources." The site contains over 150,000 digitized items "revealing the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history." It is primarily broken into sets useful for the classroom, and is a point of access to over 300 UC websites, covering subjects such as the arts and sciences, history, math, literature, and more.

The first thing that really jumps out when you go to Calisphere is how many options you have to search or browse their collections. Along with an easy to see search box at the top, there are also drop down boxes for their "Themed Collections" and a "Browse A-Z" box of subject headings.

A main component of Calisphere is their "California Cultures" collection, a huge group of primary source sets that really show the diversity of the history and population of California.



A helpful tool is that when you click on any of the featured photographs, it immediately takes you to the complete record and history of that photo.

Although I suppose there is no one OPAC for this site, the capabilities it allows you in searching and browsing far outweigh the lack of a specific catalog. It is interesting to browse around on the site, and any page you go to is full of links that can help you find something applicable to your research, teaching, or plain curiosity. The A-Z list of subjects is also incredibly helpful, and the portal to the hundreds of other UC websites makes it incredibly easy to find authoritative information, primary sources, and historical essays.

Richard Hugo House catalog on Librarything.com

Richard Hugo House (RHH) in Seattle in a non-profit organization for readers and writers. Part of the house is dedicated to a small, non-circulating library open to members of the house only. Recently RHH moved their entire catalog from Microsoft Access to Library Thing. In part, because the Access file was corrupted and also partly because library thing allows users to view the catalog from outside of the library. I’m interested more in thinking about the effectiveness of using Library Thing as an OPAC than in evaluating Library Thing as a whole.

One of the major weaknesses of Hugo House’s plans is that there is no link directly from the website to the catalog. The only information on the site is on the library web page with a link to the FAQ (a Word document) for using the catalog. Perhaps the staff made this choice intentionally to encourage users to read the FAQ before beginning their search but it does make it difficult to actually access the catalog.

Library Thing is a relatively easy program to use once members do access the catalog. They have the option of changing the view though the library staff chooses which fields are shown in each view and not the users. Members can also view the social information for each title and get recommendations based on titles in the catalog. This information is gathered from multiple sources and the site generates up to six lists of recommendations based on tags and social information.

The tags were entered by library volunteers but seem to follow a strict order throughout. However, the information included in the tags is limited and pertains only to the call number assigned by the library and the name of the section. For example, the tags for Norman Mailer’s work The Spooky Art are “060MAI, writing/publishing resources, 060, writing life, Norman Mailer.” This helps users link to other books in a section but it doesn’t allow for very complex searches. This means that users will be most successful when doing a known-item search.

The collection at RHH also includes nearly 150 scripts donated by the University of Washington as well as several videos and cassette tapes. Because Library Thing was created to list books, adding other types of materials can be awkward and time-consuming.

Using Library Thing for the OPAC at RHH is a good idea in many ways. First of all, it’s cheap. Library Things charges just $15 per year for non-profits (up to 3,000 books). The service also allows RHH to show non-members what they collect which may spark interest from other Library Thing users. The program works well but as an OPAC more steps could be taken to increase the ease with which users search and navigate the catalog.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries

Admittedly, I have a vested interest in UNC libraries that many people in the class probably don't have. After all, I was born and raised in Chapel Hill, and actually used the UNC library system there while in high school. Unsurprisingly, they seem to have updated their OPAC in the intervening years, so I was back at square one for navigation anyway.

The site's homepage is free of any artificial clutter - no large, distracting pictures here. Most importantly, the catalog search is prominently displayed and requires no additional clicks to get too (something I generally hate about the UT libraries homepage.) Almost as easy to find are the links directing the user to the electronic resources the school has access to, something that is increasingly important as more and more researchers choose to access online publications instead of requesting paper journal archives, for instance. The help links are also very easy to find including links to Endnote and Refworks, as well as the "Ask a librarian" feature - which directs the user to a page with links to chat with and email librarians, as well as a big, helpful button indicating whether any librarians are online and automatically opening the chat window. It appears that like some other OPACs already reviewed on this blog, the system has contracted out after-hours questions to an independent answering service.

Also displayed on the home page are links so some of the more specialized resources the library offers, including a special search for the Media Resource Center film collection and the digital collections including DocSouth, the university's impressive attempt to" provide Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture." DocSouth is a tremendously fun resource to browse, and with a little clicking I discovered a digital facsimile of the 1861 Texas constitution, accessible to anyone with a web browser.

I have some caveats with the system, however. The home page links to separate homes for the Health Sciences Library and the Law Library, which confuses the issue of whether or not those collections are searchable from the main catalog search (they are). And of course, the catalog cannot correct one's spelling (someday they'll perfect that technology for things other than Google), so if you're me and have trouble with words like "penicillin," you might see the no results page, full of tips to modify a search, but giving no indication that you might have spelled your search terms wrong. Once you actually make it to a catalog record however, you can save it if you have a library account, add it to Refworks, and even view its MARC record. You can also hit the "Similar Records" button and pull up a list of every other entry with at least one of the same subject headings.

The Library system does not appear to have a blog, or at least there's no handy link to it from the OPAC. The Law library has a very nice "blawg" linked off of their home page, with library updates and useful tutorials and links.

In general, I find the UNC Library site to be very easy to use, and full of interesting resources, though it may take some clicking to get to them.

Retrievr

Retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore Flickr images by drawing rough sketches or uploading images. Finding images on Flickr is mostly textual, for example through tags and keywords, or social, for example, through friends or groups. Retriever, on the other side, is using visual images as queries. Retrievr brings back 20 results for each query, all of them appear as thumbnail in one page. By clicking the thumbnail, you go to the original copy of it in Flickr and get more information such as author, tags, and comments.

Here is the result page of my try of drawing a red heart: http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/#sketchName=2008-02-13-17-55-25-840115.12. To me, it seems like images retrieved by Retriever were of similar color (the red chair), or of similar shape (the baby face), or of both (the red heart) to the sketching query. Retrievr search images matching the most pronounced shapes and slabs of colors.

Later after playing with it for a while, I found other interesting aspects of Retrievr.

(1) Retrievr retrieves different set of images when the position of the sketch on the sketching board changes. Instead of putting the heart in the middle of the sketching board, I drew another one in the top right corner of the sketching board. Retrievr gave me a totally different set of images and the right corners of the images matched my sketch. http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/ - sketchName=2008-02-13-17-55-25-840115.30

(2) Retrievr cannot identify letters. I wrote a red “A” and got back no image containing the letter A. http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/?sketchName=2008-02-13-17-55-25-840115.3#sketchName=2008-02-15-20-15-47-829302.2

(3) There were always images taking position in the result list but were not actually available (instead of the real thumbnail of the image, it shows an icon saying this photo is currently unavailable.) It makes me doubt if Retrievr does a real time search in Flickr’s database. One possible explanation is it might suck images, possibly only part not all, from the Flickr, process them technically to improve the search performance, and then store them in their own database. When it tries to link back to the original image in the result page, it happens that the image has been taken off by the author.

Retrievr works pretty well. It always brings me several matching images out of the twenty every time. I here have some thoughts which may improve the interaction between the system and the user.

(1) Is there any possibility that Retrievr could retrieve more images for each query? Currently, Retrievr only brings up 20 images and I think it should be able to get more from Flickr, which is such a huge collection of images, to satisfy users with high recall expectation.

(2) Is there any possibility that Retrievr could cluster the retrieved images, for example by shape, by color?

(3) Is there any possibility that Retrievr could offer some interaction letting users with high precise expectation give feedbacks on the first try of the search and improve the search results by doing a second one with users’ feedback in mind?

(4) Is there any possibility that Retrievr could get rid of those images which are not available at the moment of the user conducts the search. Why images which could not been seen take up positions in the result pages?

Linda Hall Library

Since I have an interest in pursuing science reference librarianship, I decided to evaluate the website for the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology, which is one of the most interesting libraries I’ve ever heard of.  It is a privately-owned, independently-funded library that focuses on the sciences, but is free and open to the public.  It is located in Kansas City, Missouri, on a 14-acre arboretum.

 The home page of the website is neatly designed, with blocks of text advertising different areas of the website to explore.  There is also a navigation bar at the top of the page that remains fixed no matter what links you click on, which I found helpful.  This navigation bar also includes a search function, either for the whole site or the OPAC.  As you click around the site, there are many hyperlinks within the text of the various pages.  Following all of these can be a bit confusing and overwhelming, since they just lead you to one place after another, but it is equally easy to simply go through all the links in the navigation bar.  Another helpful feature of the navigation is that, when you click on a tab in the bar, any links underneath it also appear on the left side, so you can track your progress within the site.

 The library is involved in many different things and offers many events and features to the public, including tours of the library and grounds, document delivery across the country, library instruction sessions for students, a cosmology theater, lecture series, and, of course, an OPAC.

 As mentioned before, the OPAC can be searched from the home page, but this is only as a keyword search.  A more in-depth treatment of the holdings can be found under the Collections tab in the navigation bar.  There is a general summary page for the entire holdings, and then specific pages for Science, Engineering and Technology, and the History of Science.  This last collection is a special collection of rare books with its own rooms and rules about visiting.  Some images of the rare books are also available for use and download on the library’s website, which is very helpful to the user.  The History of Science Collection has also been the focus of several online exhibits through the website.

 The OPAC itself is called LEONARDO, and is actually the combined catalog of the Linda Hall Library and the catalog for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which is surprising and somewhat incongruous, at least to me.  There is an extensive FAQ section that is quite helpful in navigating the catalog.  The default search setting on the OPAC is for General Keyword, though that can be changed to all the expected settings, such as Author, Title, Subject, Call Number, etc.  There are some settings, however, that surprised me, including Journal Keyword and All Journals Alphabetical, Subject Keyword (a function that the UT OPAC used to have and one that I personally miss), Series Keyword and Series Alphabetical, and Shelf Title Keyword (I’m not really sure what this means).

 All of these options were readily available on the LEONARDO home page, though there is also a tab labeled Search to click on.  Here, you have the same screen as the home page, but another set of tabs appears, giving the options for Basic, Advanced, or Power searches.  The page tells you which search function you’re using, and what the differences between the searches are: “Basic Search allows you to perform a keyword or an alphabetical search. Advanced Search allows you to perform multiple keyword searches and limit/sort your results. Power Search allows you to use operators with keyword searches and limit/sort your results.”

 To test the system and see what kind of results I got, I performed a general keyword search for “supernova” and got 29 results.  These results are initially sorted in alphabetical order by title, though they can be resorted by author or publication date (though relevance would have been nice, too), and can also be limited by location, type of material, and language.  The record showing the holding gives the following information: title, author, publication date, location, collection, call number, and whether there is more than one copy.  There is also a feature to add a record to a personal list, which is connected to the accounts card-holders can create on the website.

 Overall, I find this website to be well-maintained and fairly user-friendly.  It nicely allows both serendipitous browsing (by following the myriad hyperlinks embedded in the text) and a more controlled, thorough path (by going through all the links in the navigation bar).  It is clear that the website is an important part of this institution and receives a good amount of funds to keep so up-to-date.  The OPAC is not the focus of the website, but it achieves its mission of helping patrons find the items they’re looking for in the library.

MIT Libraries

The MIT Libraries support the Institute’s programs of study and research, and includes five specialized libraries and the Institute Archives. They offer access to a wide range of materials, both print and electronic. Users can search among a variety of materials such as printed volumes, electronic journals, maps, images, and musical scores. The OPAC for the Libraries is called Barton, and Vera is the list of databases and e-journals.

The main webpage from the Libraries is very simple and attractively designed. There are helpful quick link sidebars on each side of the screen. The middle of the page displays 5 colorful links. Each of these links provides an information page with help features and assistance for the user regarding the libraries and services.

The Search Our Collections link brings you to an information page that offers FAQS for both Barton and Vera. It also provides a helpful table, the left column lists possible items that you would need to search for [archives, books, maps, patents, films], and the right column provides the links as to where to begin the search [whether in Barton, Vera, or other miscellaneous sources]. Lots of various help features are offered in tables on the other pages as well. The Borrowing + Ordering page offers a table with the left column titled “what do you want to do” [such as borrow item, purchase pdf, or find a copier location] and right column titled: “service" with links to those services. The Help Yourself page has a table with a left column that lists various topics such as: “tips and guides”, “theses”, and “technical help” and a right column offers links that direct you to the appropriate resources. The Ask Us! page has another table with the left column titled “ask us”, with has cute diagrams for each area of help: by email, phone, in person, subject experts, and group instruction. The right column offers a description of how to complete each of those tasks.

You can search the Barton Catalog using either a basic or advanced search. You also have the ability to search only within Journals, Reserves, New Titles, etc. The advanced search of the full catalog allows you to use either a keyword search, or browse an alphabetical list. You also have to option to limit by year, format/type, language, collection, and location.

When viewing the search results page, you have the option to switch the display between Table View and List View. I personally preferred the Table View, but if they hadn’t of offered me the choice, I wouldn’t have really noticed a difference. It’s a nice feature to offer, but probably unnecessary. When viewing a full record of your search results, you have the ability to switch the format between Standard, Citation, and MARC tags. This is a very interesting feature that I’ve never seen before. Additionally, you are given the option to search within your results.

I found this OPAC to be very user friendly, and the amount of choices, features, and opportunities for help on this site is amazing.

NYPL, Humanities and Social Sciences Library

I decided to check out a section of the New York Public Library's Online Access site, the Humanities and Social Sciences Library. Along with how lovely the site actually is, one of the first things you'll notice when arriving at the site is the search box at the top right hand corner of the screen. You can enter in any search terms and use the drag down box to choose where on the site to search, including "everything", "circulating", and "archives", among others.

The Humanities and Social Sciences Library at the New York Public Library is a research library only, which means it does not lend out materials, and the collections are available for use free of charge online only. It is home to nine general Humanities and Social Sciences collections and another eight special collections including the Berg Collection of English and American Literature and the Rare Books collection.

The page itself is easy to navigate, with a left hand side bar offering information about the collections, resources and services, about the library, and a section of "Quick Links" including links to search the catalog and ask an e-mail reference question.


The online catalog, or CATNYP, is clear and aesthetically pleasing, with easy to read links and sections for searching. You can search in a variety of ways, including by regular keyword (author, title, ISBN number, etc.) and by other, more uncommon ways, including the "Govt Doc #" or the "Music Publisher #, sort, and search in the entire library or specifically in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

One section of the NYPL's Humanities and Social Sciences Library is the Dorot Jewish Division, which is "one of the great collections of Judaica in the world and the most accessible for both scholarly and personal use." The collection has material on all aspects of Jewish life and also includes Hebrew and Yiddish-language texts on general subjects.
The "bitter herb" of the Passover Haggadah,
Dorot Jewish Division, NYPL


Each link you go to for a collection in the Library has a huge amount of information about the library itself, the specific collection, and the holdings. The pages are laid out beautifully and contain incredible amounts of useful information along with easy to find links to get more information, such as on visiting hours or the history and preservation information about the collections.

The New York Public Library is known for being one of the greatest libraries in the world, and it's no surprise that its site should be so well laid out and easy to use. The Humanities and Social Library of the NYPL offers a magnificent amount of special, informative, and useful items and collections and its site and OPAC definitely do it justice.

International OPAC's and Issues of Accessability

For the sake of my own interest, this week I decided to look at some international OPAC's to learn a little more about the transferability of user principles, content and arrangement principles, as well as issues associated with accessibility and dissemination. Several large German institutions have created the ProbadoProject (Prototypical Operation of Common Documents) to try to establish commonality in best practices and metadata extraction for non-text based digitization projects in an effort to homoganize the country's digital libraries. One of the key participants in this project is University of Bonn. So I went to the school's website to gain a little better understanding of how German university OPAC's may differ from more familiar American one's.

One of the overriding OPAC principles is that of designing display interfaces in a way that best meets the needs of institution's specific users. Because most of the users of Bonn's OPAC are inevitably German students and faculty members, it is interesting that the site offers instructions in both German and English. This also allowed me to explore the site because I don't speak German. The fact that the English is offered suggests that Bonn must consider English speakers (students and researchers) an important user group. I approach my critique from this perspective to assess how this user group's needs are met. Although most search function keys are offered in English, result content is generally in German, thus limiting accessibility to English speakers. The main exception to this rule is site's standard search function, which not only offers search results in a variety of categories. These include the familiar title and author searches as well as free search (which I deduced to be like a keyword) and a pull-down menu of search functions with specific catalogue information (such as ISBN.) Search results display in English, with some interesting iconography, and options for finding, reserving, or ordering are also displayed as "more information." In all, the site adhered very closely to U.T.'s OPAC, and as a non-German speaker, I was surprised that it was actually somewhat easier to navigate Bonn's system than our own.

The major issue I have with Bonn's OPAC is the apparent lack of non-text based materials. Because of its association with the ProbadoProject, I fully expected to find an on-line catalogue of music, graphics, etc. However, I was unable to find such a collection. However, this may could be due to a number of reasons. Such collections may not be accessible due to copyright or related issues (i.e. only accessible with an institutional log-on), because digitization of these materials is still in a theoretical stage at Bonn (although this seems doubtful), or it could be a design principle flaw (thus not allowing this type of search-ability to English speakers.)

Beyond these issues, it is apparent to me that Bonn has made a conscious design, content, arrangement, and accessibility decisions to meet the needs of its users, despite international differences.

Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections / Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

The Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections is more an aggregate of private collections and former record labels than what we might otherwise consider the domain of the audio archive; i.e., historically and culturally significant recordings; wax cylinders and other early commercial formats; etc. The Rinzler Archive’s holdings are accessible to public, however.

Part of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C., the Rinzler Archive includes the holdings of and publishing rights for several independent post-War American record labels. Cook Records, Dyer-Bennet Records, Monitor Records, Paredon Records, and, most famously, Folkways Records (founded by Moses and Frances Asch): these were labels that focused generally on American and international folk music traditions. Additionally, they were labels founded and run by folk music's champions, and the Rinzler Archive includes collections of papers, photos, catalogs, patents and personal tapes associated with these labels’ founders. Significantly, the archive also includes the collections associated with the Smithsonian’s own music initiatives - its audio/visual documentation of its annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival along with its own ethnomusicological field recordings (which have been released on CD in recent decades). Finally, the Rinzler Archive holds several tape and photograph collections that relate to music - the Frederic Ramsey Jr. Tape Collection and the Lee Hays Papers.

These somewhat confusing collection principles ultimately place the Rinzler Archives somewhere between government institution, record label, music vendor, and audio/visual archive. Nonetheless, the Rinzler comprises a fairly comprehensive audio (and, to a certain extent, visual) survey of folk music traditions from around the world.

Object Characteristics. The Rinzler Archive’s audio holdings (which, again, are mostly former album releases) have all been digitized. Thousands of original LPs (and CDs, later), their original album covers and liner notes reproduced, are presently available, along with their audio content (in mp3 or “lossless” flac format), through their vendor Smithsonian Global Sound. They’re available, it should be said, for a price. The Smithsonian owns the rights to the music, but that does not mean the music is free. Rather, music can be bought ala iTunes, by the track or by the album - or purchased as a compact disc. Curious users can listen to audio clips of each track, however, and liner notes can be downloaded free of charge.

Further explanation from their vendor's website:

“Smithsonian Global Sound… extends the notion of the "Long Tail" of internet music sales, making available "people’s music" from archives in India, Africa, the United States, and elsewhere, increasing the internet’s range of access to the world’s cultural heritage. The revenue earned from sales of downloads and subscriptions supports the creation of new educational content and is shared with archival partners, who in turn pass on a portion of those revenues with artists and communities.”

A standard keyword search was provided for online users. Search options also included the options of choosing a specific country (e.g., Ethiopia), culture group (e.g., Bosnian), genre (e.g., drinking songs), instrument (e.g., oud), label/archive (e.g., Cook or Folkways), language (e.g., Sanskrit), and/or year. These search criteria corresponded exactly to the metadata provided for each album.

The archive itself, located in Washington, D.C., serves more traditional research and educational needs. Online, however, its intended audience seems to be a more general public - a general public, presumably, with an abiding interest in folk music and a few extra dollars to spend on downloaded content.

NASA Headquarters Library

The NASA Headquarters Library catalog was a little difficult to review because I was not actually allowed access to NASA's catalog. The library itself is not meant for public use, only for use by employees of NASA, so unless you are accessing the catalogue via a NASA computer or using a password you cannot see the books/articles/etc. that are available in the physical library. However, the website for the library provides a vast assortment of databases, websites, and sources for the information a person is looking for.
The NASA library is focused on aerospace, engineering, technology, etc. so that is what the website's sources focus on. At the top of the home page there are several lists that offer the user several ways to search for the information. A person can search by subject, by document type, or by database. These choices are neatly arranged in alphabetical order, and make are very easy to find. After choosing, for example, the subject of Aerospace, the different types or resources are displayed so a person can either browse through all the types of resources or select one resource, such as Books Online or Websites. The user then chooses one of the options and is redirected to that website.
This is good for a person who is simply browsing for general information. But this is not helpful for a person who wants specific information. A NASA employee can simply go to the Library Catalog and search for the information. But there is no way for anyone else to find specific information unless it can be easily classified into a subject such as Mathematics, Aerospace, etc. If it can be classified in this manner the website directs the user to online databases, journals, websites that can give a person the specific information they are looking for.
The fact that the NASA Headquarters Library is so focused on NASA employees is a major weakness of the OPAC. The creator of the website compensates in some ways by clearly labelling which databases are available to only NASA employee, but this is not done for all links (the links at the top of each page are not clearly labelled so everyone can tell which ones the public can go to and which ones are restricted to only NASA employees).
A user of this OPAC can also request alerts for when certain articles, books, or journals arrive so that the user can view them immediately. A user may also ask the library to buy a book, article, etc. if it is not already available. These are both extremely helpful; however, these services can only be used by NASA employees.
Overall, this is a good OPAC with a lot of helpful information, but the major problem is that it is aimed toward NASA employees. If this were a small-town library that would most likely not receive a lot of outside visitors this would not be such a problem. However, NASA is very much in the public eye and it is most likely one of the first places many will look when searching for documents relating to aerospace or engineering. But the user would not even be able to search the Library Catalog in order to find information.

AISD's iBistro OPAC

As promised, I found a rival school library OPAC to review, but I have to tell you that it was harder to find than I thought it would be.

Thinking I should check out the OPAC used in Austin I.S.D., I thought I'd be able to visit just about any AISD school website, find a link to the library, and go from there. I started with Burnet Middle School, where I volunteer on Thursday afternoons, but was unable to find any link to the library at all from the school's website. Then I headed over to the McCallum High School website, but I couldn't find any link to the library there as well. At the websites for Travis and Lanier High Schools, I was able to find links to their libraries, but when I clicked on the School Library Catalog link on each, I was sent to a "server not found" message, which lead me to think that maybe outsiders just aren't allowed to see AISD's OPAC. But then again, that didn't make much sense, because the librarians would want the kids to be able to see the catalog from their home computers, wouldn't they? Next, I headed to the Austin High website, where I finally had some luck. Not only was I connected to the libary's OPAC, but from the OPAC's main menu, I could switch to search the OPACs of any of the other schools in the district. Fifth school is the charm, I guess! Not to be too critical because I know school librarians are busy people, but some of those websites could use some work.

But I'm glad I persevered! AISD's OPAC program is called iBistro, published by SIRSI, and from first glance I could already tell that it's better than the Destiny OPAC I previously reviewed.

Instead of a half-empty home page, iBistro gives tons of fun choices: a Best Sellers section, where you can click on links to lists such as Publishers Weekly or the New York Times; a Recommended Reading section with lists for the Caldecott, the Newbery and more; and a What Others Are Reading section which lists the Hottest Title, Author, and Subject. For each of those sections, you can click a More button, which brings up a screen of additional choices, such as links to Pulitzer and Hugo lists in addition to Caldecott and Newbery. When you click on More in the What Other Are Reading section, instead of just one listing for each, you get the list of the most popular titles, authors, and subjects in the library for the past 3 months.

But the best part of the lists is that when you click on one, like the Newbery for example, it takes you into the library catalog, listing the winners in chronological order, telling you which campuses in the district have each title, and sometimes showing you a picture of the covers. If you click on Details for one of the listings, you then see a summary; reviews from Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal and more; and it's availability, including due dates, for each school in the district that has a copy. Wow! What great and easy-to-use resources for kids looking for something good to read.

So while the lists initially caught my eye, the main page offers other interesting choices too. First, prominently at the top of the page, you can click on an Espanol button (sorry -- I don't know how to type the accent mark) which instantly changes the entire page into Spanish. On the Spanish page, there's now an English button where the Espanol button used to be to change it all back. How fabulous!!

Next to Search/Home, you can click Find It Fast, which brings you to a list of general subjects (Animals, Business & Industry, Cars & Motors, etc.), each also represented by photograph (some of which are pretty darn cheesy). Click on a subject (let's say Animals) and you'll get a more detailed subject list (Apes, Aquariums, Bears, etc.). Click on Apes, and you get the catalog's listing for that subject, including a fiction book, an book on orangutans, and a biography of Jane Goodall. Off to the side, you see a heading of You Found Titles in Categories and lists the categories for you with clickable links. For Apes, we get Children's Literature, Psychology (General), and Zoology. Underneath that, you get a heading of Try These Too, and lists for us related clickable subjects like Primates and Gorillas.

Find It Fast is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure who it's for. Kids who can identify pictures but can't read yet? That might work for animals, but does the guy in a shirt and tie with a cell phone to each ear really represent Self Help? But then again, would kids who can't read yet need to be doing a search for Self Help? Maybe older kids would find it useful too.

Next to Find It Fast is Knowledge Portal, which brings you to a list of the library's subscription databases. The World Wide Web link after that brings you to a list of reliable sites on the free web, like Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and U.S. Government Information.

The last major link on the home page is the Digital Library link, which I thought would show the library's e-books. Instead, it has two sections: The Photo Collection has a random assortment of photographs of various schools, school libraries, teachers, students, etc., while the District Publications section has digitized versions of district directories dating back to 1925 and of The Messenger, the district's bimonthly newsletter, dating back to the 1950's. Curious.

As for actually searching the catalog, when I searched for "Bronte" like I'd previously tried in the Destiny catalog, I finally got results I was expecting. Hooray! There's Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, biographies, critical essays, a movie... Much improved over the Destiny system.

All in all, I'd take iBistro over Destiny for my school library any day. It will be interesting to see which school districts picked which system or if there are other systems out there as well. I'll keep searching!

St. Andrew's Episcopal School Library

Hi everyone,

As a future school librarian, I thought I should check out a school library OPAC. I chose St. Andrew's Episcopal Upper School library (http://follett.sasaustin.org/) here in Austin because the librarian is Barbara Jansen, whose Electronic Resources for Youth class I took last summer. Some of you who have been in Austin a few years might recognize St. Andrew's as the school that turned down a $3 million donation for refusing to remove the short story of "Brokeback Mountain" from a senior AP reading list.

Here's the Wikipedia entry and an interesting Publisher's Weekly article about the incident:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Andrew's_Episcopal_School_(Texas)

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6288794.html

My favorite part is that I remember reading at the time that the senior AP English teacher who had the story on her class reading list (as an option, not a requirement) was going to remove the story from the list anyway as soon as the movie came out because she doesn't offer reading choices that have been made into movies. Don't you love it?

Anyway, both the Electronic Resources for Youth class and Barbara herself are wonderful, so I had a hunch that her school would use a quality OPAC.

The library's OPAC system is called Destiny, is published by Follett, and is the same system used in Leander ISD, where I used to teach. I wonder if Austin ISD uses it as well or if there is other OPAC software out there for school libraries, but I guess I will wait to investigate that in another blog entry. As for using the software before when I was teaching, I was never especially wowed by it, plus I usually knew what I was looking for when I went into the library and didn't need to play with all the bells and whistles. This was my first experience examining it closely.

The layout of the initial search page is kind of strange, which is something I thought about when I used it in Leander too. All the information is crammed into the top half of the screen while the bottom half is completely blank. Why? Why not make the information bigger (as it's relatively small) and take up more space? Or how about using that blank space to list some searching tips? This is for kids, after all, and I can promise you that plenty of them don't know the difference between a subject and a keyword search, nevermind what the "Power" or "Visual" buttons mean. How about giving them some explanations? There is a tiny "How Do I..." button in the upper right corner which pulls up a window of FAQ's, but the button is way too small for most students to notice.

In addition to your basic keyword, title, author and subject searches, it allows users to search by series, which I think is useful. You can search by call number too, but I'm not sure who would use it. It allows users to choose which school(s) in the district they want to search but doesn't appear to connect to any larger catalogs outside the district. The "Power"tab is the advanced search feature, which allows for searching by multiple keywords, year, material type, etc. Another search feature is called Visual, which is different than what I expected: I thought it would give a visual image of the materials, but instead it gives users the choice of viewing an index of graphic novels or Spanish-language books.

But when I started actually searching, I became frustrated pretty quickly. For example, I typed in "Bronte" and hit Keyword search. Apparently, a Keyword search defaults to a Subject search. It returned two entries under Charlotte Bronte, a biography and a "WebPath Express" link, which when clicked brings the user to a list, including links and descriptions, of reputable web sources with information about her. It wasn't until I searched the name again as an Author search that Jane Eyre was listed. Why doesn't the Keyword search find the word as an author name as well? Then when I searched for Jane Eyre as a Keyword search, it didn't find any results. Why wouldn't the Keyword search look for titles? I didn't get it, and I tried to figure it out for a while. I can promise you that kids using it would give up much sooner than me.

Other frustrations:

1. When I clicked on the details for each of the two listings for Jane Eyre (one published in 1991 and one in 1993), the '91 version gives a sentence-long summary of the story while the '93 version has none. Why is that?

2. The search results will tell the user if the book is currently available or not and how many copies the library holds, but it doesn't tell when the book is due or allow the user to reserve it. I know in the school library where I taught, the students could go up to the circulation desk and ask for a book to be put on reserve, but why bother the librarian? Why can't the OPAC do it?

I will admit that the OPAC has a few good points:

1. With the search result listings, each entry starts with a little icon to show the user what type of media it is (book, CD, video, website, etc).

2. There's a print button for users to print their search findings.

3. Users can add specific findings to a personal list. It also allows users to make a list of the searches they've done, which is awful handy for forgetful students.

4. The WebPath Express links , which I mentioned above, which are next to some items are pretty cool. As school librarians, you don't want the kids out there searching on the free web, and this tool is a good source for pointing them toward reliable web sources.

In conclusion, I'm relatively disappointed with my Destiny experience. Compared to the other OPAC's I'm familiar with from my personal use (mostly UT and APL), it's not especially easy to use -- and it's supposed to be used by kids! For my next blog entry, I definitely plan to search some other school library websites to see if I can find a rival school library OPAC to compare it to.