Plugging in

A year into it, about 11% of browsing is now being done with Firefox; it’s been downloaded over 100 million times. Though not impervious to security problems, Firefox is a safer bet than wretched old IE. Besides, fear isn’t the only reason to pay attention to differences between browsers. Faith and serendipity still count: open-source Firefox inspires nice little plug-ins.

A visit to the sprightly Shifted Librarian today alerted me to a good example: a plug-in that helpfully installs a library search engine right into the Firefox browser. Here’s an example: after quick installation of a plug-in, a search field for the Ann Arbor District Library catalog lives right below the search engines that come loaded with Firefox by default:

The Ann Arbor District Library already offers nifty RSS functionality. Now, thanks to a volunteer programmer, users can track the library’s holdings in another convenient way. The AADL search plug-in sticks to keyword searching, and tucks that Google-like simplicity into a user’s own (Firefox) browser. Since the plug-in is open source (of course), it can be tweaked to work with any number of other library catalogues. In fact, of course, many other libraries offer their own version of this Firefox search plug-in.

And how does it work in practice? I installed the AADL search plug-in (a one-click process) and searched the library catalog for good old “Lord Byron”:

The results were underwhelming, to say the least: sound recordings of gospel singing beat out anything by or about our famous poet, merely because of accidental proximity in contents listings (“The Presence of the Lord” by Byron Cage). But such are the perils of swampy, flat ‘keyword’ fields. It would be churlish to blame the creator of this plug-in for this particular OPAC’s wheezy treatment of keywords. He’s made a ‘last mile’ connection to the user, and it puts new pressure on the library to make its keyword search more relevant.

And what of that creator? Turns out he’s a high school student named Matt Hampel. If Firefox can leverage budding talent for non-commercial, communally-oriented ends, isn’t that enough reason to switch?

So we gather

Fresh outta Norway, here’s an intriguing marriage of wikis, folksonomy, and metadata harvesting: meet Collib, an experiment launched by a student at the University of Tromsø.

The idea here: records are harvested from OAI-PMH-compliant repositories and brought into the wiki. Users – now end-users of these records – then ‘tag’ them in the wiki. Presumably, discussion can ensue – though in my tour of the wiki today, I’m not seeing such discussion.

Let’s take a peek at a tagged record:

The record is in the middle of the screen, and Collib user tagging is on the right. Note that further tagging is always possible, ala Flickr. The original record and other indexing services are also linked (no guarantees, though, that you’ll find the item actually indexed elsewhere).

In the nav bar on the left: “Untagged records” are helpfully grouped together, awaiting end-user angels to tag them. The relationship of “Subjects” and “categories” is a bit of mystery to me. And I wonder who gets to stipulate which repositories are being harvested.

What an undergrad wants

The attempt to present services to students is a matter of much hand-wringing in academic libraries. “They want Google!” “They need databases!” “Convenience!” “Depth!” “Hopeless!” “Infinite!” & etc.

In my informal tour of various library interfaces today, one presentation has really stood out: The University of Minnesota’s Undergraduate Virtual Library. Take a look:

We have an OPAC search bar right up top, but we also have, clockwise from the top right, a ‘full text finder’ (and you know the kids are crazy for full text); a ‘top five’ list of applications that, presumably, you could get help using in the library; the ubiquitous ‘quick links’; a list of recently updated blogs (nota bene – this university library actively promotes and supports blogs across the campus); and, rounding back up top, immediate access to research guides, broken down by subject.

And now to the middle: a big button inviting students to a personalized ‘my library’ space – not an easy sell to undergraduates, unless well integrated and promoted, as this essay about NC State’s service suggests. And finally a cute application called the Assignment Calculator:

…wherein you enter a start date, a due date, and a step-by-step roadmap gets generated, linked to guides to such matters as defining a topic, formulating a thesis, conducting research, reserving lab time, revising, writing instruction support, and RefWorks tutorials – all listed under the assurance that “you can beat the clock!” One can even ask for email reminders of various tasks.

Grad students have a similar “dissertation calculator” available on their own portal page (if I had had such a tool, surely I would have shaved years off the process…). In general, Minnesota has set up service pages for a range of user categories, demonstrating thoughtful envisioning of needs – and perhaps even collaboration along the way. A giant “feedback” button (not pictured here) lives at the very top of the Undergraduate page, inviting a click.

As a 2003 NSF-EU DELOS Working Group Report puts it, “Personalization is required to make an increasingly heterogeneous population of digital libraries accessible to an increasingly heterogeneous population of users.” Minnesota’s custom response to the real-world needs of that fitful and sometimes panicked user, the college student on deadline, meets that requirement with (let’s hope infectious) creativity.