New England Chapter of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Presented:

The Dawn of the Embedded Library:

Integrating Library Services into People’s Trusted Networks

Tuesday, 3 October 2006, Tufts University, Medford, MA

Conference Announcement:

http://www.neasist.org/pc/programs/20061003.html

Speakers:

Nicole Hennig

Web Manager & Usability Specialist at the MIT Libraries

Annette Bailey and Godmar Back

Creators of the LibX Firefox toolbar extension

Tim Spalding and Abigail Blachly

Founder and Librarian of LibraryThing

Event Blog:

http://neasist.org/events/?

Conference Notes (BE):

Hennig

(http://www.hennigweb.com/presentations/neasist-embeddedlibrary-hennig.pdf)

Hennig emphasizes the need for libraries to know their users' behavior and culture and to understand how they do their work. To this end, at MIT she used student volunteers to photographs of themselves and screen shots of their computer activities to chart how they seek information. She then interviewed the students.

Hennig found that most searches begin with google. Some students seek information through phone calls. They all used sources recommended by trusted networks including friends and professors, but rarely librarians. She said the resistance to asking librarians for help may come from an MIT culture that encourages students to figure things out for themselves. This culture leads to a "brute force" method of retrieval. Researchers may spend hours whereas a librarian could suggest a more efficient approach.

Users complain that there are too many starting points for a search. MIT developed Project SimpLR (http://libstaff.mit.edu/simp/index.html) to guide them in their population of Metalib and use of X Server. They needed to develop a local metadata aggregator to house content such as D Space and their image collections which would not work well in Metalib. Metalib in general does not work well out of the box.

Hennig recommended the book Contenxtual Design (http://www.amazon.com/Contextual-Design-Customer-Centered-Interactive-Technologies/dp/1558604111). The book says the best design makes use of products already in use and simply improves their usability. The design begins with the user in mind.

Hennig also discussed using scripts to improve Firefox. For more, see http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/.

A good example is Book Burro: http://bookburro.org/.

It allows you to comparison shop when looking at a bookseller web site.

Hennig suggests that libraries should take a modular approach to technology, such as is advocated in Design Rules (http://www.amazon.com/Design-Rules-Vol-Power-Modularity/dp/0262024667). For creative design ideas with library applications, see the Library Mash-up Competition: http://www.talis.com/news/press/Competition2006.shtml#TheCompetition

Bailey and Back

Bailey and Back have developed LibX, a Firefox extension. See: http://libx.org

Developer only needs some javascript and XML skills.

LibX provides a downloadable tool bar that allows users to search the Library catalog in the tool bar search box. LibX also allows users to get catalog search results (through a small, icon link) as part of the search results in a google or amazon search. It also allows for highlighting of text on any web page, coupled with right clicking to execute a search in the catalog.

These screen shots illustrate LibX's power dramatically and simply:

http://libx.org/

LibX works with proxy servers and multiple OPACS.

Other tool bars of interest include

FastJack

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/library/toolbar/index.html

Halbar

http://www.asl.edu/library/halbar/

Web Localizer Services

The Library Look up Project

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/2002/12/11/librarylookup.html

Wag the Dog

http://www.library.gatech.edu/research_help/WAG_faq.html#1

Spaulding

Spaulding developed the LibraryThing. See: http://www.librarything.com

Users create their own bookshelves and tag, or give headings, they have created to each book. You can link to users who share the same books as you and view their collections.

84 million users

74,000 reviews

abebooks now owns 40%

Moving towards some selective privacy.