Category: ‘puters

Google Google everywhere

Posted on by jessamyn

But back to my number two boyfriend: Google. As you know, all librarians are in love with Google and we are all anxiously awaiting the days when it will put us out of a job…. OK I am kidding. However, we all love to talk about Google. Here are two non-librarian perspectives on Google. One which tells us how people search Google and other search engines. Is it any surprise that Google says that “Searchers become expert searchers very quickly” using Google? No, it isn’t. The second article is by a sysadmin pal of mine who went to a talk about Google’s place in research and librarianship. He was a bit suprised at all the gushing admiration he saw. He wrote this post: Google is Good? Talking about how while Google may not be evil, it both is and is not, good.

In the market of information, we tend to believe that the results Google provides are “most relevant”. In fact, the concept of relevance is redefined…. It is as if every time you searched for Apartheid, you got back a USA Today article on the end of Apartheid. This would be useful if you wanted a generalist knowledge, but it would be less useful if you had to study a specialist sub-area of the topic. To sum, as we begin to trust Google as a central knowledge authority, we do become more “dumb.” By accepting generalist documents and valuing ordered results, we’re buying into the system. There is inherent danger here; I feel that for many reasons, this danger is lost on most.

some systems librarian writing from webjunction, and me!

Posted on by jessamyn

WebJunction finally wore down my resistance. After several attempts to get paid work for them over the years failed, I wrote them an article for free. The good news is that they’re all incredibly nice, flexible on deadlines, and not heavy-pencil editors so my article is pretty much how I wrote it. It appears in their Focus on Systems Librarianship section [which is full of good reading by the way] and is called “Those Darned Users! how to serve your users without sacrificing safety, privacy, or your sanity.“

why don’t vendors care about us?

Posted on by jessamyn

Jenny has a very astute post wondering why our OPAC vendors don’t care about us in relation to the “my checkout list as an RSS feed” meme that has been going around. I, too, have been staggered by the lack of responsiveness I have gotten from vendors about even basic functionalities like Netscape compatibility [Sirsi doesn’t have it], or customizability [changing the colors on your OPAC should be stupidly easy, not maddeningly hard] to say nothing of more complex features like using CSS for layout, or RSS for content richness.

For me, this just drives home the true nature of the buyer/seller relationship and the OPAC lock-in. Support is expensive, and if it doesn’t lead to more sales it’s just barely worth the money of the vendor because where else is your library going to go? Do you really have the time, energy, or money to shift all of your records to a new vendor who probably doesn’t have a better track record than your current one? Does your systems librarian need more work to do? Can you be allayed with promises that the next version is going to fix the problems in the current version, and ignore the fact that a new version will probably break as many things as it fixes?

For every librarian like Jenny who is going to bust some heads — and more power to her — there are ten librarians who can just barely keep their OPAC running, much less customize it to suit their specific needs. Don’t believe me? See how many people running our current OPAC haven’t customized the interface nearly at all besides entering the name of their library. I know how hard it is to customize the damned thing, I congratulate them for even being able to do that. While we’re contemplating why they don’t give us RSS, let’s also be remembering that they don’t give us much else either, particularly for libraries less tech-savvy than Jenny’s. We’ve gotten over marvelling at the fact that the OPACs work, now I for one would like to see them working well. I bet they have RSS feeds planned for the next roll-out, but they’ll probably try to sell them to us. [update: catalogablog puts up some links to open source options you can manage yourself, and don’t forget oss4lib]