Not to beat a dead horse (a soggy pizza?) but my quibble with the pizza
analogy is that I might think "I live in Portland, I want some pizza,
I'll use Google to search for Pizza Portland, ME and it will
automatically push me into Google local." I do searches like this all
the time. In fact, I get annoyed when Google doesn't push me into Google
local and I get results like a Wikipedia entry on Pizza. But I only get
annoyed when I want to find local results, which I indicate by putting a
geographic location into my search.
I know Google knows where I am (Google owns me) and I'm sure they could
push local results without me specifying where I am, but sometimes I
don't want local information (isn't that part of the global village
internet thing?) and I like being able to say when I want local and when
I don't. If I'm searching for a book title, maybe I want to know where
to buy it, but maybe I want reviews or I can't remember exactly what the
title is or I want to find the author's homepage. For page rank to work
well (as I understand it), searches would have to be for In Cold Blood
Portland, ME. Which isn't really how too many people would search.
That being said, we have a Google box and people are way more
comfortable searching with our Google search than they are in the OPAC
(also, it was very easy to carry that search box over onto our MySpace
page). A lot of what I took from several of the presentations at CiL
(especially Tim's) was that libraries and library catalogs are too
isolated. Lousy search is a part of that- no one wants to look for a
book in our catalog and then again in the state-wide catalog. Especially
if they have to have the title exactly right (heck, I use Google to get
past the "it's called something like 'With Luke-warm blood' or 'Chilled
Blood' or something!" all the time) and not make any typos.
>spend less time
> twiddling with every live-long field in a record or upgrading our
local
> installation of Innosirsi Voylibris, and focus more on pushing print
into
> digital, making discovery easier, building nicer facilities, and
procuring
> more content for people to use.
I think about this a lot. How much time do I spend fussing over our OPAC
interface when lots of people just use our Google search? Or Amazon?
This all fits into my personal pet theory that libraries spend a lot of
time naval gazing in the sense that we see ourselves as individual
institutions. The public tends to see us as a big chain (especially
public libraries). If the library in the neighboring town does something
one way, they think we should too- Target is consistent, why isn't The
Library? Turning up in a general Google search isn't as helpful as the
work that Karen suggests.
kate
---------------------------------
Kate Sheehan
Coordinator of Library Automation
Danbury Library
170 Main St.
Danbury, CT 06810
203.796.1607
ksheehan_at_danburylibrary.org
http://www.danburylibrary.org
http://www.myspace.com/danburylibrary
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Tim Spalding
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2007 8:58 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Spiderable OPACs
>The difficulty that I see with adding the contents of the library
catalogs is the page rank.
This is a valid point. I see a number of ways this can be overcome.
First, people DO want to link to library catalogs. Indeed, do a site:
or link: check on any of the major libraries, and you'll see it
happening every day. From blogs, class bibliographies and every other
type of page out there, people link to OPACs. People find it natural.
Best of all, every time they do, it works!
Unfortunately, twenty minutes later the session dies and it
fails-"psyche!" But people learn, and they stop trying. They learn
that libraries aren't like everything else on the web. They learn, as
we all agree, that "OPACs suck." Except we see the "OPAC." They see
the library itself.
Second, there *are* patterns within the links. It would be interesting
to do a straightforward PR run through a standard OPAC, but I suspect
that PR would be distributed in decent, non-random ways, particularly
if the "in" is also non-random. Someone links to the LC's copy of
Nabokov's Pnin. PR flows to other Nabokov books. Even subject headings
are not random-some are way more prevalent, and these tend to be of
greater general interest. That is not to say that, as a former SEO
expert, I wouldn't think long and hard about record-to-record link
structure. There's a lot of upward potential. LibraryThing isn't very
well-optimized, and it's about the 15,000th most popular site on the
web. Still, the English site alone has 4.5 million pages indexed.
My pizza point appears to be misunderstood. The fact is, I can search
for ANYTHING that isn't a library book. I can search for Indian food,
or dog aromatherapists, or ... well you get the idea. "Anything" is a
superset of "any book." OCLC has just over a billion holdings. Google
stopped counting at 8 billion pages in 2005. It later claimed three
times Yahoo's 20 billion. It's not getting smaller.
Tim
On 4/23/07, K.G. Schneider <kgs_at_bluehighways.com> wrote:
> > I suppose "IEEE Conference 1998 Georgia Tech" might get one closer,
> > but I honestly don't think exposing our vanilla OPACs are going to
be
> > the path to much joy. There needs to be a different approach to
this
> > problem because merely opening our catalogs up to Google reeks of
> > polishing the turd.
> >
> > -Ross.
>
> I was just about to make similar points (though perhaps without that
> interesting vanilla/turd oxymoron), specifically that, first, there
aren't
> 117,467 copies of In Cold Blood in Google (to use the number of
libraries in
> the United States, let alone the world), and if there were, that
wouldn't
> necessarily be a good thing; but beyond that, there are additional
concerns
> with all these mini-me catalogs, primarily the high cost of
installing,
> maintaining, upgrading local software, and the high cost of creating
and
> maintaining local metadata... "cost" in both cases meaning both what
is
> literally expended in terms of library resources (money, and people,
though
> of course people are money) and in terms of a loss of balance in where
we
> focus our efforts.
>
> In other words, if we all shared one OPAC for book-like things (the
way we
> do for Amazon, or for that matter, LibraryThing), maybe we'd spend
less time
> twiddling with every live-long field in a record or upgrading our
local
> installation of Innosirsi Voylibris, and focus more on pushing print
into
> digital, making discovery easier, building nicer facilities, and
procuring
> more content for people to use.
>
> Karen G. Schneider
> kgs_at_bluehighways.com
>
Received on Tue Apr 24 2007 - 09:11:16 EDT