The single most import problem in making library resources findable in
Google or other search engines is putting them online with stable URLs
in the first place. That's rule number one of my "rules of the Google
economy[1]":
Linking must be possible
Linking must be desirable
Linking must be measurable
The second problem we face is that even though citing books and other
works is desirable, the library form of citation is very different
from what search engines expect: links. So once our catalogs are
reliably linkable, we need to encourage linking to the resources in it.
When professors claim that Google doesn't have results they value I
point out that it's likely that they haven't linked to the sources
they value, and if they have, they probably haven't linked to them in
a way that Google can index them (the third problem).
To make linking easier, I've been adding code snippets to the record
displays that allow people to embed a bookjacket and link to our
catalog simply by copying and pasting[2]. The "embed this" code
snippets on YouTube made sharing videos by posting them to blogs or
bulletin boards easy and fun, why not try the same with library content?
Tim is right to point out the caveats as he did, but those are
problems most of us should be excited to face...once we make linking
possible at all.
[1]: http://maisonbisson.com/projects/rules-of-the-google-economy/
[2]: example: http://library.plymouth.edu/read/341391#bsuite_share_embed
--Casey Bisson
http://maisonbisson.com
http://about.scriblio.net
On Mar 18, 2009, at 11:38 AM, Tim Spalding wrote:
> *Library links don't always mean what Google expects. They aren't
> "votes" and they aren't relevancy-ranked. For example, every book with
> a "Love Stories" LCSH will link to a list of books with that LCSH, but
> in most catalogs the list will be arbitrarily ordered. To the PR
> algorithm, however, page one is more important than page two.
> *Libraries duplicate content pell-mell. To take the HiP catalog I
> reviewed recently again, each book has ?five subpages with bits of
> data on it. This runs the risk of triggering the "Googlebot found an
> extremely high number of URLs on your site" error (delivered to your
> Google Webmaster Central page). I know this problem well. LibraryThing
> triggers it every day. If our sitemap showed every page we'd be way
> over the 50,000,000 limit.
Received on Wed Mar 18 2009 - 16:20:25 EDT