…are to be had at librariandressup.com!
Many thanks to Amy — whose current Facebook status is “face of an angel and the mouth of a sailor” — for the link (possibly via Phil Bradley?)
Category: Library Stuff
International Survey of Library Automation
Marshall Breeding has published the results of the “Perceptions 2007: An International Survey of Library Automation” and I doubt they’ll make comfortable reading at SirsiDynix HQ (unless Scribe has got it right!)…
The products of SirsiDynix, Unicorn and Horizon, received low satisfaction scores from libraries responding to the survey. Unicorn, the company’s flagship ILS performed somewhat better than Horizon. 14% of libraries running Unicorn and about half of those with Horizon indicate interest in migrating to another system — not surprising considering SirsiDynix’s position not to develop that system into the future. Horizon libraries scored high interest in open source ILS alternatives. The comments provided by libraries running Horizon voiced an extremely high level of frustration with SirsiDynix as a company and its decision to discontinue Horizon. Many indicated distrust toward the company. The comments from libraries running Unicorn, the system which SirsiDynix selected as the basis for its flagship Symphony ILS, also ran strongly negative — some because of issues with the software some because of concerns with the company.
Voyager, Horizon, and Aleph 500 sites are the most likely to consider moving to Open Source (such as Koha or Evergreen).
If Open Source isn’t of interest, then the satisfaction levels amongst Polaris customers makes that a very attractive system to move to.
“Spin, spin, spin the Wheel of Justice…”
Kudos if you automatically sang to yourself “…see how fast the bastard turns” 😉
If you’ve no idea what I’m on about, then YouTube is your friend.
Anyway, I got to playing around with the OPAC keyword cloud data and ImageMagick and came up with this (reload that web page to get a new image)…
I was struggling to remember how to find the points on the circumference of a circle until I remembered that one of the chapters in the original ZX Spectrum manual covered the topic.
The word in the middle is chosen at random from the top 200 most popular keywords used on our OPAC and the surrounding words at those most commonly used with that word.
Tasty mash-up
I must admit that when I think of a “mash-up“, food rarely enters my head (even though most people in the UK associate the word “mash” with mashed potato).
Anyway, what do you get if you mash-up the following: a picture, an RSS feed, Helene Blowers, a cake?
Just in case no-one said this on the day, Helene — you look good enough to eat! 😉
I’m kinda curious how the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike licence attached to the image applies to all this… The licence allows you to make derivative works (e.g. a cake) but I guess you are not allowed to sell the cake. You have to share it (yay, I like cake!) and “distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one”.
So, does that mean the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County has broken new ground by creating the very first Creative Commons cake?
All the very best with the new job, Helene!
More “In their own words”
Here’s a few more…
Michael Stephens:
Helene Blowers:
David Lee King:
Meredith’s book:
spam in the hot topics
Apologies for the spam words that are currently appearing in the hot topics cloud at the moment.
It looks like the BlogJunction blog has been hacked — if you view the page source for the blog, you’ll find multiple hidden links to gambling sites (the links are currently being hosted by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya UOC).
I’ve removed BlogJunction from the list of sites used for the cloud, so the spam should disappear in the next 48 hours.
Librarians — in their own words
I’ve spent the last couple of days being inspired by Brendan Dawes‘ book “Analog In, Digital Out“, and playing around with ImageMagick and PerlMagick.
This evening, I felt like doing something for Kathryn Greenhill to commiserate with her for not winning the “Best Librarian/Library Blog” Edublog awards, so here’s what you get if you take ImageMagick, 30 minutes of furious Perl coding, a little bit of random font rotation, a suitable JPEG source image, and the RSS feed from Kathryn’s blog…
I thought Jessamyn West‘s photo might also make for a cool textual mashup too…
In other news, Michael Stephens has gone a little dotty…
“Engaging the Xbox generation of Learners in Higher Education”
Just a little pointer towards a report recently released by Jebar Ahmed and Mary Sheard in the School of Education at the University of Huddersfield:
New generation learners seem to be surrounded by technologies everywhere, at home, at school and in their pockets. Computers and interactive white boards are available in the classrooms, but how do these learners engage with technologies to actually learn? And what can we learn from them to inform teaching in HE?
The Executive Summary is available here.
Spellchecker + Network Effect = Better Spellchecker?
I’ve been having a few email discussions relating to whether or not it’s best to use a standard dictionary of words for an OPAC spellchecker or an index created from the actual holdings of that library…
Standard dictionary
pros: correct spelling
cons: suggestion might not find any results, might not contain buzz/new words
Custom dictionary
pros: suggestions should find results
cons: will contain mis-spellings (e.g. “mangement”), needs regular updates, might be difficult to extract the words from ILS/LMS/OPAC
I’m beginning to think that the best of both worlds might be to start with a standard dictionary and then let your users/patrons build upon that. In other words, whenever someone carries out a successful keyword search on the OPAC, automatically add the keyword(s) they used to your dictionary so that they can appear as spelling suggestions in the future.
Any comments?
HIPpie “Did you mean?” ready for testing
I’ve just finished plugging the first bit of HIPpie into our test OPAC:
I’m gonna be out of the office for most of next week (3 days in London at Online Information 2007), but I’ll start contacting those of you who said you’d like to be involved with the testing. The test code just requires you to paste a short block of JavaScript into one of the HIP stylesheets (searchinput.xsl).
At present, the version I’ve plugged into our test OPAC uses a generic US word list, but the idea is to allow libraries to either upload their own word lists or choose from country specific ones.
Although the code needs to be able to create links that contain the HIP profile string and the session ID, neither of these are actually passed back to the server at Huddersfield (just in case session privacy is an issue).