March 2008 Archives

Sometimes when someone asks for a recommendation, you know just what to suggest. Like, if you ask me what the best single science fiction book ever is, I'll say, "Dune," without a pause. If you've already read that, I might suggest one of the other novels of Frank Herbert. That's a list, sure. But it's pretty specific.

Other times... well, people just want to narrow their options down from the millions of things in the pile to something, well... less universal. And, thankfully, there are all kinds of folks out there who put together all kinds of lists.

For example... If somebody asks, "Can you recommend some good kids' books?" you can put together your own list, sure. Or, if you want a nice, safe, high-quality and (let's face it) easier answer... point to the classic ALA lists of Newbery and Caldecott winners. Somebody else has done the hard work. You just need to have a way to list the lists.

Clearly, this is another plug for the list making function in WorldCat.org. In this case, lists that already exist... somewhere. My point here is that it's really handy to have a single URL that can point people to content that's already passed through a screen like the ALA or the Mystery Writers of America, who provide The Edgars, a list of great mystery novels.

See... when we say, "there's this great list..." we mean that there's the list itself... but then there needs to be a place to put it. In the past, we might have arranged recent Caldecott books on one shelf in the library for a display, or handed out a flyer with the list printed out.

Now, once we've put the lists into WorldCat.org, we can share lists of lists with very little effort. And because the click-path is so easy (open the email, click on a list link, click on a link to the material), it shortens the distance between all the effort that when into reviewing, editing and recommending materials, and the end of a search.

Uh-ph, I've got the tax time blues. I just got a call from our tax guy, Gary. We owe money big time this year. Apparently the family farm still brought in way more income than it usually does--even though the wheat crop was ruined by early summer rains and hail damage. Why does it never feel like you have more money in the bank, even if your W-2s and 1099s say you do?

So we are looking at setting up quarterly payments, and double checking to make sure we're keeping up with our charitable giving. I never tend to think of my tiny 2% of the family farm as a "small business," but perhaps I would do well to start. First step, I think, is to check out AlexVancina's list for Small Business & Taxes materials. Looks like Stephen Fishman is a writer I should get to know!

Good luck to everyone out there in the U.S. who is still searching for deductions. And for everyone not in the U.S., I know I should not be complaining. You typically pay way more taxes than we do!

…or any image that tells WorldCat users more about you! Registered users can now add an image to their profile. This image will display on your public profile & public lists- and will help give our community a face as we go forward.

You can also share more about yourself with other WorldCat users via your public profile – where you’re located, what your interests are, your occupation, your email (you may chose to keep your email private if you'd like), etc. Your public lists will also be listed here- and more to come as we evolve.
Or if you’d prefer, your profile can be private.

Just follow the 'Edit Profile' link if you are a registered WorldCat user - or if you are not yet registered, create a free account.

Do you have a WorldCat profile you'd like to share?

I'm sure you're familiar with the game, "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." You know, the one where you think of any other actor and try to work your way back to Kevin via movies with combinations of actors. So... Rutger Hauer has a Kevin Bacon Number of "3," because he was in "Blade Runner" with Daryl Hannah, she was in "Splash" with John Candy, and John was in "JFK" with Kevin. I've enjoyed this game for years, and have speculated that the single best reason to have an Internet at all is as a host for IMDB, which helps scratch this itch when you just can't quite figure out on your own how to get back to Kevin.

Well, WorldCat has a feature that I tend to refer to as the engine for playing "Six Degrees of Francis Bacon." Officially, it's called WorldCat Identities, and its built into WorldCat.org.

Let's say you're looking at the record for a work by Mr. Bacon; Essays and New Atlantis. If you click on the "Details" tab, you'll see an "About the Author" section with a link to Francis Bacon. Click there, and you go to the "Identities" page for him. Take a look... the page has a timeline of publications by and about Bacon, links to his most popular works, and a tag cloud of related subjects. The purpose of WorldCat Identities is to have just such a summary page for every name in WorldCat.

The game portion of our program comes into play with the "Related Identities" section near the bottom. These are people and/or characters that are closely related to the identity you're viewing. So, of course, Shakespeare is related to Bacon. Click on the link to Shakespeare's page, and you'll see a list of related identities. Now... only the top 10 Identities get shown. So I tend to start working on my own at this point.

You can go to a main search page for all Identities here. And I know that Shakespeare wrote about the historical character Cleopatra, so let's see what her Identities page looks like. Interesting... Elizabeth Taylor! So Liz has a Francis Bacon Number of "3." (Taylor to Cleopatra to Shakespeare to Bacon).

Being able to connect millions of authors, characters and groups (like the Beatles) through their links into library materials is a different and (for me) fun way to explore subjects I'm interested in.

By WorldCat Guest Bloggers Christie Heitkamp and Arnold Arcolio

Behind the WorldCat.org curtain, a team of individuals is dedicated to ensuring our site is meeting users' expectations, needs, and wants. Our team is comprised of several people from various parts of the organization who are responsible for discovering, analyzing, and advocating user perspectives during the development of new features and functionality on WorldCat.org.

Defining the user experience on WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local has been an interesting challenge because of the evolution of WorldCat from a librarian's tool into a site that can be searched by anyone on the web. When OCLC took the innovative step to give everyone on the internet access to some of the WorldCat data, we had to reconsider our target users. Now our site is being used by librarians, library patrons, students, teachers, authors, editors, and pretty much anyone else who happen upon our site from other search engines, like Google.

So, what does this mean exactly to the user interface and the user experience?
It means we have new users to account for during our design and development of new features and functionality. While our site may have been great for librarians to search and find items, we have to evaluate whether it is meeting our other users' needs and expectations as well. This, of course, means understanding who exactly is our target user.

We use several different methods to gather information about our users. One method is to actually visit the user and interview them while they are in their own environment. This helps us to understand the conditions and limitations they are typically facing while using WorldCat.org and helps us create a persona for that target user group. It also helps to understand the terminology that the user is familiar with. You may find us hanging out at your library looking for people willing to let us hover over them while they use the computer to find stuff in their library. If you do, don't be scared! We're not CIA or anything, we're just OCLC user experience people looking to learn more about our user to make our website easier to use.

We also conduct usability evaluations, where we observe users completing tasks and listen to them explain their experience and their expectations while trying to complete the tasks given to them. The usability evaluations are typically done in our in-house usability lab or often times we conduct them remotely. We use usability evaluations to help us understand the user's behavior on our site, and it also helps uncover any obvious usability problems in our interface. More detailed information about OCLC usability evaluations can be found at our usability site, which is created and maintained by our usability guru, Mike Prasse. Or, if you are interested in reading more about user experience and usability in general, check out some of our recommended books on the topic.

Just wanted to let you know that we've made some changes to our homepage. We hope this will make it easier to find what you're looking for and find out about other things you can do with WorldCat, while still maintaining the simple, clean search box. Watch for a few more tweaks on this in the coming weeks.

Take a look at WorldCat.org and let us know what you think!

In grade school I used to pull the little card out of the back of the library books to see who else had checked out that book. This would have been 1974 or '75. All students had to sign the card to check out a book. I often jumped right to the card in the back without looking at the first page of the book. If I knew who the kids were on the card, I'd get that book. I'd also tell those kids that I was reading the same book they read.

My favorite book was Danny Dunn and the Voice from Space by Jay Williams. I would count the number of times my name appeared on that card! (Call it an early recommendation engine.)

So when an Amazon Kindle became available in OCLC's library on Friday morning, I rushed over to pick it up. I've been exploring a number of collaborative reading tools and have been impatient to get my hands on a Kindle. By Friday evening I'd bought Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel and a magazine.

I'm less than half way through Naked Conversations. Let's see ... I'm at locations 1175-77. I don't know what that means. This is one of the problems I have with the device. How can I discuss this book with someone else if I can't tell them which pages I've highlighted. Which reminds me of another problem, I cannot highlight text across "pages" or screens or locations ... I don't know what to call them.

I'm collaborative by nature. I like to share what I'm reading with other people. I learn more that way and hopefully others learn a bit from me. (I confess to buying used books just so I can see what other people have highlighted!) The Kindle is a great little device for reading, but I haven't figured out any way to share my experience with someone else. Anyone else really dig that passage on location 1176?

I'm also concerned about the notes I have taken on the device. The menus and scroll wheel have proven to be more effective than the highlighter, pen and PostIt Notes I carry around in all my books. (The Kindle is certainly lighter than all that stuff.)

Because these tools are so easy, I've been taking notes just as frequently as I do with a printed book. Here's the problem: I have to Deactivate my Kindle from my Amazon account in five days because the device has to go back to the library. What will happen to my notes?

Amazon has a "Manage My Kindle" page, but neither my notes, bookmarks or highlights seem to be there. I'm assuming they are stored with the book on the device which means I will lose those things when I deactivate. Guess it's back to PostIt Notes for me.

Enough about the problems. As I said I'm well in to Naked Conversations. I've read enough of the book on the Kindle to have gained comfort with the physical nature of the device and the reading experience. Both are very good.

The device has odd angles, but it fits in my hand perfectly. I can page forward with just a nudge from my palm or a finger. It is much easier than turning a page. As silly as that sounds in the last day and a half I've found myself reading in situations where this benefit became apparent. Thinking back to my days working in Washington D.C., this thing would be really handy while riding the metro.

I do wonder why there are prominent volume buttons on the bottom of the thing. And the large side buttons seem rather fragile, but the ergonomics are fine otherwise.

The reading experience is great. While reading the first few chapters, I found myself still thinking about the device and the necessary actions. But earlier today I realized that I'd been reading for a while without thinking about the device itself. When was the last time you stopped reading in the middle of a paragraph and thought about the font used to print the book? All of the actions required to read from a printed page are wrote; we don't think about them. I think it says a lot that I reached the same point with an e-reader after spending so little time with it.

The screen display is a wonder I seem to be able to scan "pages" nearly as quickly as I can on a printed page. The text buttons are more difficult than those on a Blackberry for some reason. Pages do not advance fast enough for me and the Back button still confounds me. It is clear that this is an immature device. I will expect a lot more from later versions.

All in all I'm looking forward to finishing up Naked Conversations and getting updates from a newspaper, but I'm disappointed that my content appears to be locked inside this neat little thing.

I guess I'll keep looking for that little card in the back of the book.

The AllFaceBook blog is reporting two new applications for Facebook both created by Amazon. I've added the Amazon Giver application. I'm just clicking through it now. I'm excited to see this given my experience with Amazon Wish Lists, which I've blogged earlier.

This is a big step for a major e-tailer. Moving out to the social Web introduces some interesting questions for businesses, and for libraries. I've been working through some of these questions myself since we introduced the WorldCat in Facebook application. The socialization of content raises new questions for everyone:

• How deeply do we allow users to integrate our content into third-party sites


• Which social platform (or platforms) do we develop for? Facebook? OpenSocial?


• Do we build on Facebook and Bebo's (AOL!?) implementation of their platform or MySpace's implementation of OpenSocial?

These questions need to be asked in the context of the organizations audience which means that new tools for measuring that audience (and for measuring success) will be needed. How valuable are the page views to your site if most of your content is consumed via RSS? How do you manage usage statistics reported from multiple social networks? What does "engagement" mean for your organization?

The recent Graphing Social Patterns West conference highlighted the shift from measuring impressions to measuring engagement. One of the more interesting AppNite demos at GSP West was developerAnalytics, a Facebook application that measures the virality and engagement of an app as well as revenue generated from the app. This is just an early example of the tools that businesses will need to master as they socialize their content through the Web.

There is a lot to learn in this emerging environment. Here at WorldCat, we are eager to learn. And as we learn, we'll bring web-scale to libraries.

Hats off to Elizabeth, who is working hard to save money. Her end goal is to retire early (waaaay early) at 35. One of the ways she's saving money for retirement (in addition to budgeting and snowflaking) is by using her local library...and WorldCat. She's written a great post about how easy it is to use WorldCat, and of course I can't resist pointing you to it.

In addition to her beautiful hack (in the grand tradition of life hacks), I of course want to point out the ease and simplicity of creating a list and then sharing it or setting up an RSS feed for it. A few of us here in WorldCat land are getting together in a few days to brainstorm all the cool things you can do with lists and RSS feeds...

After a long weekend of shoveling snow here, I’m reminded of what a warm welcome spring breaks used to be.

Well, for those of you lucky enough to enjoy a spring break now, you might want to take a peek at what’s available in WorldCat to help you make the most of your time off. Try a search for travel information on WorldCat.org and see what strikes your fancy. Or a quick search on lists that users have created about travel reveals a nice compilation of materials that may spark some ideas. (This list on Tuscany Travel by jstemmer is certainly making me yearn to travel abroad).

And if you’re planning to stay a little closer to home this spring break, we all know no road trip is complete without an eclectic mix of music. Here’s a list created by apbuckeye of “Cds I just have to have in my car when I’m traveling!”

Not your taste? No problem. Come create your own list and let the sharing begin!

Two days ago, (Ernest) Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died at the age of 69. If you've ever played a fantasy role-playing game (RPG) -- or any other RPG, for that matter, live or in a videogame -- or enjoyed the recent films of the Lord of the Rings, or (I'd argue) if you are a fan of the Harry Potter franchise... you owe a debt of thanks to Gary.

Gary was known to credit "The Veldt" by Ray Bradbury and Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Conqueror" as early influences that pushed him towards fantasy and science fiction in his work. The disposition of characters into "alignments" of good/neutral/evil and lawful/neutral/chaotic was influenced by Poul Anderson's "Three Hearts and Three Lions." The mythology of D&D was taken from a wide variety of historical and literary sources, including two now famous dragon gods, Tiamat and Bahamut. While the final D&D figures are quite different than their historical namesakes, it is obvious that Gary and Dave Arneson, the game's other co-creator, had done some serious pre-reading for their creation.

Personally, I know I would not have become as involved in reading (and writing) fantasy and science fiction had I not been able to "live" the part of characters (and game masters) in stories. Whether live, around a kitchen table with hex paper and polyhedral dice scattered among pizza remnants, or in email with friends in three states creating play-by-text worlds and adventures or in video game lands like World of Warcraft... lots of time, lots of creativity, lots of friendship, lots of fun... all thanks in part to Gary's work and leadership.

I won't resort to game-linked references for a pithy closing. I'll just say, "Thanks, Gary."

Related links:

• Gary Gygax's WorldCat Identities page.
• Fantasy game materials in WC
• Role playing materials in WC.
• GURPS Lite and D20, both free (or open source) role playing systems
  

Hi there WorldCat, my name is Laura and I’m working on the social networking product team at OCLC. Over the past several months, a new topic of interest has prevailed in my reading- and pretty much all free time activities for that matter - as my husband and I are expecting our first child in April.

Along the way, I’ve heard of several library resources, books, videos, etc., offering guidance to parents through all phases of parenting. I’m still working my way through my first set of suggestions and have created this list with a few of the resources that I’ve found helpful and others that have been referred to me through the pregnancy phase.

Since the next phase of ‘what the heck do you do once the baby arrives’ is nearing, I’m looking to move on to a new set of reading material. I did a quick search of lists and found a few interesting compilations- in particular this one from chefrb with a couple guides to making your own babyfood and Alice's 'Things I Recommend' with great sounding resources on recovery, calming a baby and nursing.

I also found a few lists containing interesting parenting topics relating to older children that other WorldCat users have shared- such as homeschooling, communicating with teens, step parenting, etc. If any of those topics sound interesting, you can browse those lists here: 'Parenting', 'Parenting', 'Parenting Styles'

However…I think I have a little time for some of those topics and right now am looking for more helpful library resources on baby care and the early years. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them!

Hello WorldCat world! My name is Alice, and I work in the Creative and Branding Services department of OCLC. I want to tell you the backstory of WorldCat...not all the political stuff, but the actual night that WorldCat went live more than 30 years ago.

You see, WorldCat starts with a fairy tale-like "It was a dark and stormy night..." What follows is the account of the beginnings of WorldCat, as told to me by Phil Schieber, who is the longtime heritage-keeper of OCLC. He knows more about the history of WorldCat than anyone else, I think.

Although it happened in 1971, the story didn't get written down for awhile. It first appeared in a Newcomen Society Address given by then OCLC president Dr. K. Wayne Smith on May 21, 1997 in honor of OCLC's 30th anniversary.

"On August 26, 1971, the Alden Library at Ohio University became the first library in the world to do online cataloging. That first day, Ohio University was able to catalog 133 books online. That first night, back in Columbus, the OCLC computer system was struck by lightning. It was an auspicious beginning. The first year it used OCLC, Ohio University was able to increase the number of books it cataloged by a a third, while reducing its staff by 17 positions through attrition. OCLC was indeed delivering on its promise of increasing access to information while reducing costs. Word of this new idea spread on campuses across the country. The online revolution in libraries had begun."

Thirty Years of Furthering Access to the World's Information by Dr. K. Wayne Smith, 1997.

Happily, there has not been a lightning strike since, to the WorldCat database or servers....