Internet Librarian days 2 and 3

Didn't take many notes on day three, so I'm combining two days in this post.  Even so, it shouldn't be as long as the day one post.  I took these notes for myself, not necessarily for the blog, so they're most definitely not session reports – hopefully some useful links to explore.

I started the day at the Summon-sponsored breakfast where we heard Peter Jacso speak mostly about how awful Google Scholar metadata is, and how whenever he points out a series of errors, Google immediately removes them from the database.  Some examples include a vast number of records with author:methods or author:password  He's just published an article under the title of "Google Scholar's Ghost Authors" in Library Journal.  Good speaker who reminded me very much of my late Grandpa Pival 🙂

Day 2 Keynote was an interview OF Paul Holdengraber, who hosts / moderates / interviews people for the Live from NYPL program – I want to search for audio of these – they should be great. (update: This lecture series is available in audio and video with transcripts AND Conversation Portraits in iTunes)  Start at http://www.nypl.org/LIVE .  Paul feels very strongly that the library should surprise people, not necessarily deliver only what people expect.

First Session – Dreaming, Designing and using mobile platforms – mostly overview stuff in this double session – I left after the first half to go listen to the UMich session (below).  Tom Ipri's slides available at http://www.slideshare.net/Tombrarian/mobile-library-platforms. Also check http://lifeonterra.com/m and compare it to the traditional version at http://lifeonterra.com/.  This is a project of the University of Montana, introduced by Jason Clark. I think Jason mentioned this site makes use of something called meta viewport, which I want to further explore.

Toby Greenwalt mentioned using a combination of Yaz + Z39.50 + PHP = mobile catalogue?  He also talked about using Shoutbomb for SMS alerts.  Red Laser, costs $1.99 in the iPhone app store, but has an SDK so someone may be able to get it to scan our library barcodes…

Designing for content-rich websites – UMich Library
John Creech is the Website Content Manager, Ken Varnum is Web Systems Manager
Use the regular libguides XML data dump to search via Solr, to integrate search results with those from the rest of the Drupal site.
Similar to UT Mississauga, librarians are listed in the catalogue by subject headings (call number ranges) and if there's a high-enough number of matches the subject librarian will appear along with the search results.  In Drupal, taxonomies are assigned to librarians.

An excellent tip picked up from Ken Varnum, Hathi is pronounced "Hot-ty" (that's 98% correct, but a lot better than the way I had been pronouncing it!  🙂

Marshall Breeding on SEO, then Andrew White from SUNY Stony Brook  Scholarly Stats, a service which is supposed to help with COUNTER and SUSHI stats.

Check out Splunk.com – appears to be a real memory and processor hog, but could provide some interesting slice and dice on ezproxy stats.

Kara Reuter, Extreme Makeover – user-centered design of http://worthingtonlibraries.org – they borrowed heavily from the museum world using a "visit" link to contain information about hours, parking, info, etc.   Their navigation choices are Visit / Borrow / Research / Interact / Calendar / About

Char Booth suggests replicating the OCLC User Perception reports at the local level – the survey instruments should be available.  "The more you like libraries, the more likely you are to like library technology" NOT "younger people like library tech"  The report Char was speaking to is Informing Innovation: Tracking student interest in emerging library technologies at Ohio University (147-pg PDF).  Really interesting results, but Char pointed out several times that this is a case study, and that results could be pretty different at your library.

Keynote – Day 3 – Growing up and Grown-up Digital – Net-Gen Speaks
Stephen Abrahms and a panel of teens – see note above about "case study".  Really interesting to hear these three young adults talk about their use of technology and thoughts about libraries, but I wouldn't bet any money that this was a representative sample of America's youth.

Nicole Engard – Library Mashups
http://mashups.web2learning.net (homepage for her recent book, Library Mashups)
http://www.programmableweb.com — tracks mashups and tools
Mashup Tools – Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com) Jody Fagan wrote an article in Computers in Libraries (2007) that explained it very well for Nicole – also chapter 7 of Nicole's book
http://readingradar.com – NYT bestseller list and merges with data from Amazon.com
http://www.thisweknow.org – interesting local / govt info for locations in the US
Check out "machine tags" on the flickr API
http://mashups.plsinfo.craftyspace.com – Library Mashup Demo site
http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api – Open Library APIs
http://worldcat.org/devnet/wiki/SearchAPIDetails – WorldCat APIs

I could really use an entire session or workshop on Yahoo Pipes! – plenty of reading to do there.

And that's where my notes end.  Overall I really enjoyed the conference this year; especially nice to meet so many twitter friends in person :-)  Might be heading to CIL2010 next April – that'd be my first time there since 1994!