Reference ebooks wishlist

Lately, I've been reading a lot from Sue Polanka's No Shelf Required blog, which focuses on ebooks. In recent weeks, she has been writing about reference ebooks and where they may or should be headed (see, for example, the post titled "The Evolution of the Reference EBook"). Prompted by her call for librarians to offer publishers more feedback about what what reference ebooks publishers should be doing, I thought I would offer more detailed suggestions here than the cursory comment I added to one of Polanka's blog posts.

Compatibility & Data Transport

The content should be stored in some format that makes it easily transported into different search platforms. At my college, where we have a federated search tool from Serials Solutions (written up here in a recent netConnect article, "Building Bearcat"), we've been frustrated by the gateways offered by some of the reference ebook publishers. A gateway is simply the door into a database. Different kinds of doors offer different kinds of access (think of how a Dutch door differs from a garage door and a revolving door). Some of the reference ebook platforms that we have at my library have an HTML gateway, which means that the data (i.e., search results) coming out of that database is not well-structured. To clean up the data and normalize it so that it is presentable in the federated search environment, our federated search tool must screen scrape the search results, an ugly process that is more low-tech than it should be. Ideally, the publishers would offer at least an XML gateway to their data.

If the data was more standardized regardless of who pubished it, it would also make it easier for there to be more possibilities for aggregating the data and creating mega-reference databases. Gale Virtual Reference Library and Credo have both been trying to line up sets of publishers whose reference ebook content can be pulled together in one place. I would like to see these kinds of aggregated reference ebook platforms be much larger in scope, akin to what you currently find in the article database world where tools like Factiva, for example, can offer access to magazines and newspapers from thousands of different publishers. I don't want to see publishers each create their own propriety reference ebook platform and then expect librarians to subscribe to each one; let's just get them aggregated into one database instead. The worst kind of platform is the one that is devoted to just a single reference work.

Findability on the Web

The publishers should expose their content to the likes of Google, Yahoo, etc. so that our users might find high-quality reference content in the place where we all know they begin their research efforts: web search engines. So if a student were to Google "mccarthyism," the first page search results might include a hit the two-page entry on that subject in Sage's Encyclopedia of U.S. National Security. If the student clicked that link in the search results, they might see a snippet of text and then a big, impossible-to-miss link that says something like, "Find this book in a library," which in turn might do a WorldCat lookup for the title. As customers, librarians should be encouraging our vendors to do more to surface their products' valuable content on the web and make it easy for searchers to locate those sources in libraries where they have access.

Forget Print Reference

As noted by Polanka in her write-up of ABC-Clio hosted focus groups she attended at ALA Annual this year, more than half the librarians in attendance said they were not interested in print reference titles. I'd count myself in that group, too. If I can get it electronically (and I'm not being gouged for it), I'll do it. Our print reference collection is barely noticed by our students; our efforts to sell our students on using print reference sources are quixotic at best.

Easy and Accessible Proprietary Interfaces

If a publisher has to have their own platform and that's the only way to get to the content, then don't make the user download some silly plugin or register for the site before they can even read any of the content. The ebrary reader that users must install before they can view ebooks in that product is an often insurmountable barrier to access for our students. Ebrary does a poor job of letting first time users of the system know that the reader is required; most users are not at all aware that that is the reason why the book they tried to navigate to is not being displayed on their screen.

The Publishers' Quandaries

There are a number of issues raised in this Booklist article by Polanka and her blog post on the evolution of the reference ebook that the publishers are wrestling with that I don't have advice for. Many of these issues stumped me and made me think more deeply about the future of reference ebooks. For example, if reference ebook publishing goes all digital, what book-like aspects should remain in the products? Should everything end up looking like Wikipedia (lots of richly hyperlinked entries but no real table of contents or index)? Should there be space for users to add comments to entries? Should earlier editions of works remain available online (and, if so, how do you make sure users can distinguish between entries from different editions). Do libraries prefer to buy titles or license them?

I can see why the publishers seem to be reaching out to librarians asking for help and input. I hope that they really listen and take to heart our suggestions.

Refresher training for experienced chat reference staff

Last week I ran a refresher training workshop for my colleagues at the six CUNY schools that share a QuestionPoint subscription for their chat and email reference services. Although I have done introductory training for QuestionPoint a number of times over the past five years, this was the first time I had attempted to do a workshop that was meant to focus on policies, procedures, and best practices in chat reference service.

The two-hour workshop was divided up into three parts, one of which seemed to resonate the most with the attendees. First, I wanted the attendees to practice being a patron in chat reference. I had all the attendees log in as patrons with me serving as the harried librarian trying to accept nineteen simultaneous chat sessions (not a recommended practice, by the way). My goal was to give the attendees a better sense of empathy for what the patron's interface looked like and how it worked.

One of the great challenges of chat reference is that you usually don't have a good idea of what your patron is doing, feeling, or looking at as you try to help them. At the reference desk, you have at least some visual information about the patron (their posture, their facial expressions, their mannerisms, can all reveal useful information that can guide the observant reference librarian). It should not be too hard for most reference librarians at a desk to understand the basics of what it is like to be on the other side of the desk. In chat, though, we don't see our patrons, we don't really have a good feel for what they look like when they are interacting with us, limitations that I believe make it harder to empathize with them. Without that empathy for the patron, a sense of what the world looks like to them, librarians are going to have a harder time engaging in a meaningful and rich manner during the chat session. So this exercise in the training, then, was merely a baby step to help the attendees get in the habit of thinking about what their patrons' world looks like during chat sessions.

This part of the training did not go so well, though, for several reasons. The technology was not really up the task: my QuestionPoint chat reference monitor flashed and blinked once I had loaded nineteen simultaneous chat sessions, limiting me from interacting much with the attendees who had logged on as patrons. I probably should have paired attendees off and had them chat with each other, with each pair of librarians taking turns to play librarian and patron. I also think that limited interaction I was able to have with my nineteen "patrons" did not give them enough of a sense of what the patron's experience is like. Perhaps next time I will have one person come to computer connected to the projector in the classroom, logon to a real academic library chat service in the QuestionPoint cooperative, and ask a real question. As a group, then, we could all see the patron interface and see what it is really like to get help in the QuestionPoint environment.

The next part of the training was an attempt to get the attendees to think about strategies for conducting a reference interview. In the chat environment, asking questions can be really tedious: it takes time to type out all those open-ended questions that you need to ask and you can often sense from the patron's cursory replies to you that the patron is disinclined (for a number of reasons) to disclose a reasonable amount of information about his/her question. First, I asked the attendees to open up Word on their computers and begin typing out the questions they'd likely ask in response to a patron's initial chat question, "I need information on globalization."

After five minutes of having attendees compose their replies, I decided to use a simple chat box (from Gabbly) embedded into the staff wiki created for the CUNY librarians who do chat reference; this chat box would serve as the means by which we would discuss reference interview strategies. I chose a chat box over the QuestionPoint interface because I wanted something that would allow anyone in the room to jump in to the session to be the librarian (everyone had the Gabbly chat box in the wiki page loaded on their screens). One librarian pretended to be a student asking for "information on globalization." Several librarians took turns typing in their reference interview questions in the chat box and interacting with the student. As the librarians typed their questions in, they explained why they asked what they asked and the other attendees added their suggestions as well.

I think the next time I try to focus on reference interview skills, I may try a different approach that ensures that everyone gets a chance to explain their approach in eliciting information from the patron. I will also want review with the attendees some of the research that discusses best practices for reference interviews.

The third part of the training session was the most successful portion of the workshop. I found three chat transcripts from our service, stripped out all personally identifiable information about the librarian and the patron, and distributed copies to the attendees. We then read each transcript aloud, with one person reading the patron's messages and another doing the librarian's messages. I encourage the attendees to interrupt at any point with comments and questions, which my colleagues enthusiastically did. We had the richest conversations of the day when we were talking about these chat interactions. The lively discussions reminded me exactly of a similar situation several years ago at a Virtual Reference Special Interest Group meeting that I facilitated at which real transcripts were similarly read and analyzed.

As we read the transcripts at the refresher training, the conversations about what the librarian had typed led to discussions about language and tone of chat communication; reference interview skills; policies and procedures in the cooperative; and lesser known features of the QuestionPoint software. It felt like almost everyone in the room spoke up during this portion of the training, something that was not the case in the earlier parts of the workshop. I think that from now on whenever I do chat reference training, I will incorporate transcript readings into the activities.

Improving tagging in del.icio.us

When it comes to bookmarking things on the web, I am a moderate to heavy user of del.icio.us. I've got three accounts, each of which is for different purposes:

1. sharing links with my wife
   
2. indexing posts on this blog
   
3. bookmarking things that I need/want for professional purposes
   

The third one, which I set up in 2004, is where most of the action is. I've got nearly 900 items in that third account, which averages out to nearly five posted items a week. I'll be the first to admit that my tagging system, while personally meaningful and usable, is probably inconsistent and shows that I made a wise decision in not becoming a cataloger.

I would like some help in thinking up what tags to add to any site I want to bookmark. I have a wishlist of things that del.icio.us could do to improve the tagging experience. Basically, I'd like more suggestions of tags. Those suggestions could come from many different sources.

First, delicious would automatically extract meaning from the page you want to bookmark. I'm thinking here of what a semantic web tool like Calais can do (I wrote earlier in the year about an experiment I did with Calais analyzing one of my blog posts). The tags suggested by the extraction process would come from whatever set of sources and taxonomies you prefer, such as Library of Congress Subject Headings, MeSH, Steve (not me but the social tagging of art objects project), LibraryThing tags (including just my tags), tags from other social bookmarking services, etc.

Next, you would also see tags from your friends on del.icio.us. It's likely that most of the people I would friend in del.icio.us would be other people working in libraries and archives; they would probably prefer the same terminology I do and offer up useful suggestions to me. I would like it if I could get del.icio.us to search my FriendFeed account to see which friends that I have there also have del.icio.us accounts and automatically add them to my delicious network.

Finally, I would continue to see (as I do now) a set of tags recommended by others on delicious who have bookmarked the same site I want to add. Del.icio.us would give me options in my account settings that would let me decide how I want to prioritize the list of recommended tags (what sources of tag suggestions would come first; how would they be grouped, if at all, etc.)

In short, when I am ready to bookmark a page in del.icio.us, I want the service to offer me the wisdom of the crowds (and, in the case of automatic extraction, the wisdom of machines). I don't want, though, just the crowds who are bookmarking in del.icio.us but also those who are cataloging, classifying, and tagging in lots of other places.

On not being scammed

In the past month, I've received a couple of emails from "Fiona King" asking me to write about some library-related content on two different web sites that both focus on distance ed. I didn't pay much attention to those email messages, the like of which I mostly receive from vendors hoping that I'll mention their product on my blog (which, by the way, I never do).

I noticed that a few bloggers, though, had decided to post links to the blog posts that Fiona had suggested. Wondering who was behind the distance ed sites where those blog posts resided, I did a little investigating and discovered:

• neither site has any sort of "about us" or "who we are" content (first red flag)
• each site had a different person who registered it (learned this by doing a whois lookup)
• after googling the two people who registered the sites, learned that they are in business together and hope to get "fabulously rich" through SEO efforts and viral marketing of their blog network
• after searching the web for info on "Fiona King," I came to the conclusion that she is the creation of the two bottomfeeders who created the distance ed sites

Although the content that "Fiona" asks us to link to is somewhat interesting, the methods that are being used to get us to link to it and the ulterior motives of the folks behind these emails is troubling at best. I have no interest in linking to their content just to help them "monetize" blogs under their control. They'll have to find other ways to make money not involving me.

Urban Library Journal to be open access

I was pleased to learn yesterday that Urban Library Journal is going open access. Work is underway to put the content of the most recent issue online and to explore whether digitization of back issues is feasible. The editors have submitted a request to be added to the Directory of Open Access Journals and applied for an ISSN for electronic serials.

In an earlier post, I explored how many open access journals are indexed in Wilson's Library Literature. Urban Library Journal is already indexed there; once it goes open access, we'll be able to add one more journal to the list of OA journals in Library Literature.

If you're interested in submitting an article, please do! Urban Library Journal occupies an interesting niche in the world of library publications and welcomes new material.