Library Web: Gateway or Destination?

Some more quotes / paraphrases from various sessions at the Computers in Libraries 2007 conference:

• "Users spend most of their time on other sites than your site." (Attributed to Jakob Nielsen by Jeff Wisniewski, University of Pittsburgh, in "Web Managers Academy: Survival Guide for Library Web Site Redesigns" pre-conference workshop)
• We should think of the library as a search destination, focusing on global discovery leading to local content. (My paraphrase of Marshall Breeding, Vanderbilt University Library, in "Millennials & the Library" presentation)
• We need to get away from the idea that the library's web site and its OPAC are separate things. (My paraphrase of Tim Spalding, LibraryThing, in "Catalogs/OPAC's for the Future" presentation)
• Libraries still need an ILS but it will not be the way that users find what they want. Discovery now happens at the network level, disaggregated from the ILS. New finding tools make traditional library catalogs obsolete. The next generation finding tools will search a wide variety of sources--they will not be a library catalog. (Roy Tennant, California Digital Library, "Catalogs/OPAC's for the Future" presentation)

In our library, we're currently working on redesigning the top page of the web site. One term that we're using a lot is gateway--we want the site to be a gateway to all the libraries on campus, a gateway to library resources wherever they happen to be. Not to disparage this intent, but the thoughts noted above, combined with our findings (not unique to Duke, I suspect) that most of our users start their research at Google or Google Scholar (and not the library's web site), lead me to think that we ought to be putting at least as much effort into making the library's web presence an effective destination as into making it an effective gateway.

What I mean by this is making sure that library resources are both findable and linkable from outside the library's web site.

Findable: Do our resource strengths show up near the top of relevant Google searches? Are we using metadata as effectively as we could? Are we putting our resources where our patrons are (Blackboard, student portal, Facebook, etc.) so that they can find our resources whether or not they find us first?

Linkable: Once someone has found a useful resource, how easily can they store it for future reference? How easily can they share it with others? Can you look up a book in our online catalog and easily post its link to del.icio.us or cite it in a blog entry? What about an article in one of our databases?

As noted above, how can we insure that people can find our resources without having to find us first?

(Nearly) Effortless Personalization

I want to see if I can pull together something from a couple of strains of thought I've encountered over the past few days.

• At the pre-Computers in Libraries conference workshop on web design, we looked at the Amazon.com web site, a site that is hardly simple yet still seems to be very effective (how often have I heard ... we should be more like amazon.com?!). The workshop presenter suggested that one of the reasons for the site's success is that, although it is a complex page, most of the complexity is about me--"New For You", "Recommended for You", "Make a Wish", and so forth, based in part on my past activity on the site and the relationships between books that I've purchased, wished for, perused, etc., and other books they sell.
• Our department (Digital Projects) recently surveyed several students about a redesign of the library's web site. One of the questions we asked was whether there was anything they'd like to see on the library home page that wasn't there now. Two of the four students for whom I was the notetaker specifically mentioned the addition of something about me--either the books I currently have checked out or the journals that I use most often--to the library's home page.
• Conventional wisdom seems to be that, with a few notable exceptions, people do not take advantage of opportunities to personalize a web page (e.g., "my library") when it requires them to do something to make it happen.

So, putting these things together, I wonder if it would be useful to think about the amazon.com model of (nearly) effortless personalization; that is, the system personalizes the page for me, based on my past activity. Perhaps we could offer an option (not a requirement) to log into the library web site similar to what Amazon does, including an option to "remember me on this computer". Then maybe we could track things like the journals or databases that the person looks at and personalize the library home page back to them. (There could also be opportunities for them to do some thing(s) to even further personalize the page, realizing that few would likely take advantage of that.) Using the single sign-on capability of Webauth or Shibboleth, we may not even need to require an explicit login on the library's web site every time for this to work--there might be a way to detect whether we already know who they are.

There are obviously privacy issues with this approach that need more careful consideration than I have given them here but I'm not sure they are insurmountable. There are more and more services that offer a "remember me on this computer" option and it may be reasonable to think our users are becoming familiar with this capability (e.g., asking to be "remembered" on their personal computers but not on shared or public machines).

There is also the task of figuring out the best technologies to use to accomplish something like this--e.g., an entirely cookie-based approach, a user profile database.

But the first question, of course, is, would this be desirable functionality to offer?

One More Day

I just got back from the Computers in Libraries conference, where I learned lots of interesting stuff and made a (long) mental list of things I wanted to explore, try out, etc., but didn't have an opportunity to do during the conference. Now, here I am, back at my regular job, already back into the regular routine. Plus, it's even slightly worse than that since I have a few extra regular work things that piled up while I was away. Wonder how far down my mental list of cool new things to try out I'll actually get before the conference fades entirely from my mind?

Wouldn't it have been great to schedule myself for four days for a three day conference, reserving the day at the end to ponder and assimilate what I had learned and to try out all the stuff I learned about at the conference? Maybe I'll see if my boss will go for this the next time I have a conference to attend!

CIL2007: Federated Search Session

Frank Cervone (Northwestern University) and Jeff Wisnewski (University of Pittsburgh) presented on "Federated Search: State of the Art". They briefly described several of the leading solutions in the marketplace today, including Ovid SearchSolver, faceted browsing in Medline, Ex Libris MetaLib / SFX / Primo, Aquabrowser, EBSCO Grokker, Innovative's Encore, and WebFeat Express. Outside libraryland proper, two products of interest are Endeca and Siderian. They concluded by noting some trends in the federated search landscape, including migration from Z39.50 to XML gateway protocols, integration with other systems (e.g., bibliographic management sofware, learning management systems, organizational portals), and incorporation of visualization and clustering.