A tongue in a cheek, thought experiment or perhaps precautionary tale of the ultimate fate of library discovery services in 2035. With a sigh, Frank Murphy, head of library systems of Cambridge-Yale University made a quick gesture at his computing device and the system began to shut down the library discovery service for the last time.
I blogged 8 things we know about web scale discovery systems in 2013 , and am working on a draft of "4 issues about web scale discovery systems we are still pondering about", but I was already pretty sure that beyond a certain point, the size of the index while important is no-longer the be-all and end all for evaluating the search. The story I am going to tell pretty much nailed that point.
I recently had the privilege to attend & present a paper at the satellite Meeting of IFLA World Library and Information Congress Information Literacy Section and Reference &
Being a librarian, I often find myself obliged to try my hand using curation tools. I was looking for a tool, that displayed curated content in a "visual" magazine like format only displayed what I explicitly selected and not everything I shared on my networks was designed to be easily viewed by not just myself but others seamlessly worked with my regular content consumption workflow.
On July 1, 2013 Google reader was retired. This was high profile news that was covered heavily online. This wasn't the only blow to RSS usage, a lesser blow was struck when Twitter announced permanently retiring the Twitter API v1.0 which allowed Atom and RSS feeds output. The current Twitter API 1.1 only allows JSON format and requires authentication to access. This took effect, June 12. For most people, this did not make a difference.
Since we implemented our discovery service, I noticed that increasingly we are asked by users if there was a way to use Summon to browse , clearly users new to a topic were overwhelmed by the number of results they were getting and besides recommender systems, browsing can be seen as a way to navigate - "knowing it when I see it". Curious I looked around to see what libraries are doing for online browsing and the main way of
Web scale discovery systems as a class of product has existed for over 4 years, and there has been rapid adoption by academic libraries around the world. We are currently way past earlier adopter phase, and probably deep into if not past early majority phase.
Organization as serious as the CDC use zombie outbreaks as a fun way to educate the public, so why not libraries? And indeed Zombies are a really popular theme for libraries particular for orientations. Libraries both academic and public libraries are using this theme to add some entertainment into traditionally boring orientations.
Last week, I had the amazing opportunity to visit Xi'an China from 9 May to 11 May 2013 to attend the Greater China SerialsSolutions' User Group meeting. Regular readers of my blog will know since 2011, I have been reading (see list of articles I am curating) , thinking and blogging about discovery systems, leading up to the implementation of SerialsSolutions' Summon in 2012 in my institution.
Like many academic libraries, we recently launched our discovery service Summon. Having worked intensively on this project since 2011 during the evaluation followed in 2012 by the implementation phase, I had an opportunity to delve into the topic perhaps deeper than many of my colleagues not on the team.
Some of my most popular blog posts in 2010 include 12 good library videos that spoofs movies or tv and Funniest library related movies made using Xtranormal. It has been almost 3 years since then, and libraries have been hard at working creating more interesting yet professional videos. These are some of my favourites including some I missed the last time around.