Federated search bake-off

For anyone in the market for a federated search tool, it can be hard to compare products. As Sol Lederman at the Federated Search Blog notes, it's a challenge "because a number of vendors don’t have publicly available demo applications" or because, "where the demos do exist, it’s hard to compare them because they’re not searching the same sources."

Lederman is proposing to vendors that they allow him to set up demo site for their products on his blog in which each product is linked to the same set of publicly available databases (e.g., Medline, ERIC, etc.) He's asking his readers to submit a list of the databases that should be included in the standard set of ten that all products will work with. I think Lederman has got a great idea. Whether any of the vendors actually participate is an open question. Regardless, it's worth submitting your list of databases as comments on Lederman's original post.

Our library at Baruch College is about to launch a federated search tool using Serial Solutions' 360 Search. I am on the committee that was charged with figuring out how to set up the product; I've learned a lot of ugly truths about how search results are retrieved via federated search and how they are aggregated. Much of the literature in the library field that that I've read talks about the relationship between federated search and usability or federated search and information literacy; I'd like to see more that gets into the nuts and bolts of how well these tools actually work and where they are typically hamstrung by the database vendors, who often give the federated search vendors less than optimal gateways into their data. Having a central place where you could test drive different federated search tools would not only reveal how different interfaces work, it might also show how the connectors that federated search companies build for you are not all created equal.

David Lankes' presentation on the future of reference

Over the weekend, I was thrilled to be on a panel with David Lankes and Beth Evans at ALA Midwinter on reference services and social networking sites. I spoke about how libraries are currently using social networking sites now for reference services, Beth Evans from Brooklyn College spoke about her library has been using MySpace for reference, and David Lankes spoke about participatory reference.

If you've been following Lankes' blog postings over the past year or so, you know that he's been talking about participatory librarianship a lot. As he has been considering how libraries should be embracing the read/write web (web 2.0, etc.), Lankes has been trying to encourage librarians to figure out ways that they can focus on promoting, capturing, and making discoverable the conversations that take place in our lives. A conversation might simply be a librarian and patron in a reference interaction, it might be patrons speaking to each other or communicating online with each other, it might be a patron thinking aloud. His ideas about conversation are grounded in the theories of Gordon Pask expressed in Conversation Theory: Applications in Education and Epistemology.

At the ALA Midwinter panel last Saturday, Lankes sketched out "Scapes," his vision of how reference conversations could be made participatory. It was a compelling presentation that to my mind seemed to link together idealized tools for personal information management and knowledge management with web 2.0 technology. The visuals he offered really tell the story much better than I can here; luckily, Lankes is great about posting links on his blog to his slides, audio, and video, as is the case with this presentation:

• video
• slides
• audio (mp3)

The QuestionPoint folks who sponsored this panel videotaped the whole event. As soon as that video is online, I'll post a link.

Reference service on social networking sites

I'll be on a panel tomorrow at ALA Midwinter making a presentation about how libraries are using social networking sites for reference services. I've uploaded my slides to my Slideshare page, which you can also view right here.

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CNY Library Camp, March 4-5, 2008, Syracuse, NY

The wiki for the CNY Library Camp event that will be held on March 4-5, 2008, in Syracuse, NY just went live. If you've never been to a library camp before, which are run as unconferences, you really should, as it is a great way to collaborate with others.

QuestionPoint's widget

In a message on the main listserv for QuestionPoint subscribers, Susan McGlamery announced today that QuestionPoint will release in March 2008 a embedded chat box widget called Qwidget:

When you deploy Qwidget on your library web site, your users will enter your service through the widget interface. On the librarian side, they will appear in the chat monitor inside QuestionPoint. This allows multiple librarians to use your existing QuestionPoint account to handle users that come in via the widget, along with all other patrons arriving via the web-based chat and email forms in use today. The same collaborative and administrative tools would be available as well.

What QuestionPoint had in mind when designing this was the MeeboMe widget, which has been proved to be an easy way for libraries to set up an IM reference service with a minimum of fuss.

Online course in virtual reference skills

ACRL is offering an interesting online course, Virtual Reference Competencies II: Practice and Expand Communications Skills and Knowledge. The course is led by Diane Kovacs, who recently published a book on the same subject that I think I better get my hands on (I've added it to my list of books on digital reference services that I've been building in WorldCat).