Category: Library Stuff

Patrick Stewart in the Library

It’s not every day that you get a former Captain of the starship Enterprise in your Library, but today was one of those days! Patrick Stewart is the current Chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, and was born just down the road in Mirfield.
The refurbished library opened it’s doors to students in September (see photos), but today was the official opening ceremony of the Student Centre (which is the entrance floor of the library). To celebrate the event, we had a string quartet playing in the foyer, and Patrick Stewart gave a speech and unveiled a plaque.
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No sooner had Patrick walked in, he headed straight for the Info Desk…
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Lisa (left) is looking slightly surprised and that’s my better half Bryony sat on the right.
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After an entertaining speech…
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…Patrick unveiled the plaque…
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…drinks were served…
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…and he personally thanked the library staff for their hard work over summer…
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I’d thoroughly recommend getting a string quartet to play in your library entrance — it definitely sets a nice ambience 🙂

What day of the week is it?

I’m getting to the point where I don’t know if I’m coming or going, but I do know I’m having a lot of fun!
Yesterday was the JIBS Workshop in London (photos here & presentation here). There’s lots I’d like to say about the debate that ended the workshop — especially regarding Nick Woolley’s narrow definition of “Library 2.0” — but it’ll have to wait for another day. In the meantime, if you’ve not seen it before, I’d recommend reading Cites & Insights 6.2 (from late 2005) for Walt Crawford‘s take on the various early definitions of Library 2.0.
Tomorrow it’s a 90 minute workshop on “2.0” (with the emphasis on play) at the National Science Learning Centre in York.
Today was really cool — Cathy Slaven (Library Systems Manager, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia) dropped in to sunny* Huddersfield for a few hours of “2.0” chat, a bit of mutual Pixies worship, and a swift half of Black Sheep at the Head of Steam. If there isn’t a Facebook group called “Library Systems Managers who like the Pixies” yet, then there should be!
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I’m extremely grateful that she chose to make Huddersfield one of her stopping points in her brief tour of the UK and Ireland, and I could have happily chatted all day long! All the very best wishes for the rest of your visit Cathy, and I hope you enjoy travelling through Europe to Vienna 🙂
Next week, I’m heading off to OCLC’s office in Leiden for a day long developer’s meeting. The day after, I need to be in Stoke-on-Trent for the SirsiDynix Symphony Development Forum. The trouble is, I’ve just discovered that there are no trains after 9:35pm from Birmingham International Airport to Stoke-on-Trent (where I’m already booked into a hotel) and I don’t land until 9:45pm! If I’m lucky, I should be able to get the last stopping train to either Stafford or Crewe, then a 15 mile taxi ride to Stoke-on-Trent, and hopefully arrive at the hotel sometime after midnight :-S
The week after that, it’s Online Information 2007 (which lasts 3 days).
…roll on the Christmas holidays! 😉
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* I lie, it rained… it rained a lot!

HIPpie update (20/Nov/2007)

Just a quick update — I’ve not had too much spare time to work on HIPpie since announcing it, partly due to work and conference commitments, but I have been slowly beavering away.
The first chunk is some of the back-end code for the “did you mean” spell checker. To try and make the code as re-usable as possible (especially for other OPACs), the back-end has been coded so that it can be used as a standalone web service:
library.hud.ac.uk/wikis/hippie/index.php/Spell_checker
Various options can also be specified to affect the output, e.g. for “newmonia thrombrosis”:

The grand plan is that anyone who wants to make use of it (either as a web service or the code that will embed into HIP) will have an account. By logging into the account, they’ll be able to specify a dictionary to use (e.g. standard US English) or they’ll be able to upload a their own word list (e.g. generated from the indexes in the ILS).
It’s still early days, but if anyone has any comments or suggestions, please get in touch!

OPAC keyword cloud

This is crying out to be done like the visual word map in AquaBrowser, but here’s a browseable tag cloud based on data from nearly 2 million keyword searches on our OPAC.
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The code looks for other keywords that were entered as part of the same search (e.g. “ethics of nursing care”) to draw out the most commonly used words. For example, the most common keyword used with “performance” is “management”. The size of the word in the cloud is determined by how often it appears with the search keyword.
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I’ve not removed keywords that generated zero search results, so the cloud for “acrobat” includes “abode”. (I’ve now removed zero result searches)
I’ll have to have a play to see if there’s a way of incorporating the cloud into the OPAC — for example, if you used a vague/general keyword such as “health“, then maybe the OPAC could suggest more specific searches for “health care”, “mental health” or “health promotion”?

(Hopefully) coming soon — HIPpie

In the last couple of months, I’ve had several email exchanges with Dynix & Horizon libraries who were interested in using some of the “2.0” features that I’ve added to our OPAC at Huddersfield, but the technical challenges (setting up an extra web server, MySQL database, etc) would have been too much.
I’ve been thinking for a while that some of the features could be done if someone else (e.g. me) were to handle the techie stuff. All the library would need to do would be to add a few lines of JavaScript to the relevant XSL stylesheets…
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HIPpie was the best name that I could think of in the bath last night, and (unless the SirsiDynix lawyers come down on me like a tonne of bricks) it stands for HIP patron interface enhancements (HIP being the product name of the Dynix and Horizon OPAC).
It’s still mostly vapourware (i.e. I haven’t finished writing the code yet), but if you’re running HIP version 2 or version 3 and you fancy adding any of the following to your OPAC, then please get in touch (email d.c.pattern [at] hud.ac.uk):

  • RSS feeds for keyword searches
  • “did you mean” spelling suggestions
  • email alerts for keyword searches
  • user reviews
  • user ratings

I’ve deliberately picked features that I don’t think are being offered via other channels (e.g. LibraryThing for Libraries or Jim Taylor).
Unfortunately HIP version 4 was never released in the UK, so I’m not sure how easy it would be to add the features to that version, but if there’s someone out there who’s familiar with the stylesheets and is willing to experiment…?
HIP is the only OPAC I’m intimately familiar with, but if other people can figure out ways of making the features work with other products, then that’d be cool.
HIPpie will be offered for free and will hopefully stay that way, unless it becomes incredibly popular.
Like I say, it ain’t ready yet, but please get in touch if you’re interested in testing it once it’s ready!

Sue the libraries!

Nice to see libraries get a mention in this week’s IT section in The Guardian:
Sue the libraries – they’re letting people get content on the cheap

[Libraries] are the institutions which have the longest experience of making copyright goods available fairly to people who have not paid directly for them; and in all the time libraries have been around, no one has come up with a better model.

But the real value of libraries comes when they deal with large, expensive and valuable digital stores of information … To any individual subscriber the cost of all these would run into thousands of pounds a year, yet this reliable information is available free, without any of it being stolen.

Reminds me of this Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon (click for a larger version):

ILS rumblings

My spider senses have been well and truly tingled! Rumours are starting to circulate about another major ILS merger/acquisition.
I find it hard to believe that the current ILS marketplace could possibly support another one of these (after the Sirsi & Dynix and Ex Libris & Endeavor mergers) but, then again, I do like surprises 😀

OPAC Survey – Q2b – OPAC Age

Question 2 – Cutting Edge or Yesterday’s News
Q2b) If “2007” represents a cutting edge OPAC with all the features both you and your users would expect, how far in the past do you feel your current OPAC is?

mode response: 2005
number of respondents: 724

Although the most common response was 2005, the majority (56%) of respondents picked 2002 or earlier.

year vs number of respondents: