Going where the user is – some stumbling blocks are still in the way (yet)

Some reflections on the Industry Symposium held by OCLC at the IFLA conference 2009 in Milan.

An often expressed notion on the IFLA conference is that libraries need to go where their users are. In terms of scientific libraries, scholars and (future) students, this is to be very likely Google and Co.

In order to reach them in these environments where they search for information an integration of their local holding data and bibliographic records into Google had been proposed by allowing search engine robots to harvest all that data. Of course this approach won’t be very productive if every single library undertakes actions in this direction on its own. Just imagine a user who wants searches for a book about Rocket science and finds itself in front of a Google result page which contains OPAC-Records of thousands of libraries. He’ll never get to the book or the content.

That’s why a mediator is needed between the single libraries and Google. Some people suggest that OCLC’s Worldcat could fulfill this role as a mediator and in fact they already posses an impressive and constantly growing database with nearly 150 million records and even more holding information from libraries all around the globe.

So now the idea  is that a user searches for a book with Google or Google Book Search. Then he finds a link to the Worldcat-record-page of that book in the search results. On this particularly Worldcat-page he finds a lot of information about the book and can locate a library in his surroundings where he could go to borrow it. In other words: a single library reconnects with its users they lost to Google and Co. through Worldcat.

Unfortunately there are some stumbling block in the way yet that need to be removed first to make this idea truly work. First of all the Worldcat records need to be harvested in order to make them findable. But to date Google only harvests a tiny fraction (about 3.5 – 4 million) of the 150 Million Worldcat’s records. To be fair though these harvested records represent in large part the most widely held items in the Worldcat. But this number is definitely too small to successfully fulfill the desired harmonic interplay of Google – Worldcat and the single libraries.

But even harvesting all Worldcat records will not necessarily be enough because we know from user studies that the first 10 results are where the user look and click. This means that Worldcat records also need to appear within these first 10 records otherwise they won’t get any attention and no user will find its way to the collection of each single library and its collections. According to Matt Goldner, Product and Technology Advocate of OCLC, to date especially or mysteriously only Spanish Worldcat records are ranked very high by Google whereas the probability to see records in other languages within the first 10 results is actually very low.

He points out though that the current situation still leads a constantly growing stream of users to Worldcat and to the libraries. He states further that by offering these users valuable and useful services and contents there might be a real chance to actually draw them from away from Google towards Worldcat as their first starting point when they search for information.

I must honestly say that this idea seems to miss the point a little bit, because the fundamental idea here still remains to reconnect at best all users with their local library collections through the Worldcat and not only a minority who searches for the records Google indexed from Worldcat.

The bottom line of all that to me is that sometimes the things are not that easy as they might seem or as they are described. In this particular context of integrating library records within Google we are dealing with huge challenges that won’t be easy to overcome, such as Search Engine Optimization for bibliographic record and foremost to get Google and Col to harvest and index the whole Worldcat dataset . Regarding the latter I’ll ask myself at which cost for libraries this might be achieved.

Wortwolke II

Wenn wir schon mal dabei sind: etwas Ähnliches gibt es auch vom OCLC. Es besteht die Möglichkeit, einen Text oder eine URL auswerten zu lassen. Man kann damit nicht so beeindruckende Bilder erstellen und es gibt nur eine Liste mit englischen Worten, die nicht „gewolkt“ werden. Dieters Bild ist damit nicht zu schlagen.  Hier nun aber die Wortwolke vom Blog Society for Librarians Who Say “Motherfucker”. Welch erstaunliches Ergebnis:

http://tagcloud.oclc.org/tagcloud/TagCloudDemo

WorldMap

Wer schon immer mal die Bibliotheksbestände von Kiribati und Island vergleichen wollte, kann es mit der OCLC – WorldMap versuchen. Hier lassen sich Informationen über Bibliotheken (Bestände, Verlage, Art der Bibliotheken, Bibliotheksbenutzer, …) anhand von schicken Säulendiagrammen vergleichen. Heraus kommen spannende Erkenntnisse. So haben unsere französischen Nachbarn zwar nur halb so viele Bibliotheken, dafür aber viel mehr Bibliotheksbenutzer. Auch spannend: die Anzahl der Verlage von Deutschland und Russland vergleichen…

http://pubserv.oclc.org:12223/WorldMap/