Kansas Tri-Conference 2007: Day 2 - Libraries, Vendors, and the Future of Search

Andrew Pace

Showed a timeline of library automation (that started on 1936!)

Where are we?

• the rfp has not evolved
• the traditional ILS system is a legacy system
• new innovation requires new technology

Discussed the current state of the ILS

what ILS catalogs do well:

• inventory control
• known item searching

what ILS catalogs don’t do well:

• any search other than known item
• anything other than books and journals
• logical groupings of results
• faceted searching
• relevance ranking
• sideways searching (suggestions, expansion of searches and search targets)

NextGen library search tools: lots of them… including worldcat, clustered searching, endeca, open sources, etc…

a few words about nextgen and 2.0:

• they are adjectives for libraries and systems
• not our patrons - they are already there

To our customers, search looks like Google and iTunes and flickr

what is faceted navigation?

• Sounds like boolean and limiting to me…
• gave examples - narrow by category at amazon, clusty’s sidebar narrowing, etc

Needle Library, Haystack College is using ExLibris (look at it)

Existing catalogs are hard to use:

• lots of topical searches and poor subject access
• keyword doesn’t work well
• relevance is really just system sort order in library catalogs
• unforgiving on spelling errors or stemming
• response time is bad

explained why NCSU wanted a new catalog…

showed a screencast of an NCSU catalog search

Most of their users are doing basic keyword searching - about 1/3 are choosing the refinements (mostly subject refinements)

usability testing:

• relevance ranking is key
• only 13% went to page two!
• faceted navigation is intuitive
• beware of library jargon
• user behavior is influenced by previous experience

Interesting tidbits:

• keyword searching up 230%
• authority searching is down 45%

Future opportunities

• integrate catalog with other tools through web services
• enrich catalog with external web services - book jackets, etc
• build cross application shopping cart functionality

Where are we headed?

• interoperability - that’d be cool… right now, it’s the exception not the rule
• web services
• 3rd parties - will become a viable source for ILS type services
• Re-integration (eventually)
• continued mergers, market consolidation, etc
• more vertical integration (portals, federated search, serials content management, etc)
• more open source, local development, and 3rd party partnerships

“Open source is more like a free kitten, not like free beer.”