June 2009 Archives

Last week we updated you on the WorldCat Identities integration enhancement, and you might be interested in a few other enhancements as well:

Updates to Advanced Search
Advanced Search has been streamlined and updated in anticipation of the single-search access to your library's OCLC eContent on WorldCat.org, coming this summer.

There are now three dropdown boxes that contain index choices such as OCLC number (also called Accession Number), Author, ISBN, ISSN, Keyword, Title and Subject.

Privacy settings now easier to spot
WorldCat.org respects your privacy, and now it's even easier to tell at a glance which items you've marked as public or private. Individual items such as favorite libraries, lists and saved searches are now marked with a red circle to indicate private, or a blue parentheses for public. Make any privacy updates from your profile page by clicking on each area's summary section header.

Each month we work on making the site more valuable and easier to use.

I don't know anyone who doesn't have strong and, in most cases, positive associations with at least a few books they read as a child. Some books bring back incredibly specific and meaningful memories, both of the works themselves, and often of the people and places related to when we first encountered them. Being able to hold a copy of a book we haven't seen in many, many years can be as powerful as seeing a photo from the deep past.

When my father was in grade school, in the late 1940's and early 1950's, his class read a number of books from the "Children of the Americas" series. He not only recalled the books, but retold many of the stories to my brother and me when we were young. When I became an adult, I kept an eye out for them. But, of course, in the days before the Web, it was difficult to search based on the scant information I had about a few of the books.

Last year, for Father's Day, I decided to take another look for some of the books. Even online, they are incredibly hard to find, and I wasn't able to find any of the ones he recalled for purchase anywhere. I did find a few of them in WorldCat, though. Not many, and not at many libraries. But enough...

Working with my local library, I got a copy of the book sent to me through ILL the week before I'd see Dad down in Tennessee for Father's Day. I wrapped the book, along with a card that said, "To be enjoyed briefly."

When he unwrapped the book and saw that it was one that he'd held in his hands more than 50 years before, he was thrilled. The ILL wrapper, however, confused him for a moment.

"This is a library book?" he asked.

"Yeah," I replied. "From Indiana. I got them to send it to Columbus so I could bring it to show you. I couldn't find one to buy anywhere, but thought you'd get a kick out of at least seeing one again."

He grinned like a kid and said, "Well, yeah. Of course." Then he started thumbing through it, remarking on how well it matched his memories. He recalled specific illustrations, passages and characters in great detail, talking them through as he read. Over the weekend he picked up the book several times, and in holding it, recalled related memories of school, friends and the times in my childhood when he'd made up stories based on the characters he'd read about.

When I left, I appologized that I hadn't been able to find one that he could keep. Like all Dads, from all times, when it comes to Father's Day gifts, he was dismissive of the idea that the gift wasn't perfect.

"I don't need one on the shelf," he said. "Just knowing it's there, and that my memories aren't failing me...yes... is a comfort."

I returned the book on time. From Indiana to Ohio to Tennessee to 1952 and back in a couple weeks.

We've just incorporated WorldCat Identities into WorldCat.org navigation proper, rather than having to satellite out to a listing and then find your own way back. You can get to a WorldCat Identities page from the "Find more information about" drop-down in the Details section of a detailed record:

WorldCat Identities is one of those fun things we like to play around with, here at OCLC. It showcases things you don't find many other places--like you can see the most widely held works by a writer, or how one fictional character is related to another one, or get a visual for publication timelines, or audience recommendation levels, or, or, or...there's a lot of good stuff there.

In fact, here's our own Andy Havens talking about WorldCat Identities:

So who's your favorite WorldCat Identity? Tell the world, in your comments. Or tweet it with the tag #wcid

Updated note:The Barack Obama Identities page linked to above does not list the subject headings with him as President. It turns out, WorldCat Identities reflects a writer or a character's bibliographic footprint. Everything on an Identities page is actually pulled from a bibliographic record in WorldCat. So WorldCat needs people to write more items (and have libraries acquire them) about Obama now that he is the POTUS, and the Identities page will update accordingly.

We have received several reports of the library holdings not appearing on the records within WorldCat.org. We have tracked down the cause of this error and will be implementing a fix overnight to correct. While this hasn't affected every user of WorldCat.org, for those that have reported seeing this problem over the last several days, we apologize. We will post a follow-up when the fix is in place. Thank you for your patience.

UPDATE: The fix has been released and we've already received reports from users that they are seeing holdings now. Thanks for your patience and let us know if you're still having trouble.

The initial phase of the WorldCat Library Profile feature launched in mid-May and is now off and running.
The following are some interesting stats from the 'Recent Items added by this library to WorldCat' area:

• There were 13,689 libraries that added a new item to WorldCat in May.

• Of those, 1,099 did not have existing recent items lists from April, so WorldCat automatically created a new list.

• 12,590 recent items lists were updated (for libraries that had new items in both April and May).

• The most popular item added to WorldCat in May, added by 2,245 libraries, was Dying To Meet You: 43 Old Cemetery Road.

We are still working to resolve the issue for those libraries that cannot yet view their profile. We hope to have a fix in place very soon and apologize for the inconvenience.

A recent discussion with Matt Goldner, product and technology advocate here at OCLC, reminded me of my favorite quote from the wonderful movie "Big Fish."

Matt described to me a workshop he conducted where he discussed what librarians and patrons believe to be most important in information discovery:

• Librarians are interested in the metadata because that's what they use to locate the item a patron needs. This is important when you and I are standing in front of them asking for help. Perfect metadata helps the librarians help us faster.
• Us patrons, and Web users, are more interested in discovering what is out there because in many cases we haven't figured out exactly what to ask for. We use search engines and keywords to locate things. Then we use reviews, tags and user comments to evaluate whether the things we've found will really help us. (Which is why reviews, tags and comments are often called evaluative content.)

If we were standing in a library or in a live chat, a librarian would ask us all the right questions and suggest the resources most likely to provide what we need. Without having that librarian there to evaluate our needs and apply their expertise, we're left trying to determine quality and appropriateness on our own.

And that's where I started thinking about Big Fish. Albert Finney's character, Ed Bloom, is a salesman and a storyteller while his son, Will, is a reporter for United Press International. Albert delivers the movie's climatic phrase in a subtle moment by saying that his son can't tell a story well because he would give you "all of the facts and none of the flavor."

That strikes me as an important difference between metadata and evaluative content. Mind you, I'm not talking about the librarians. They can provide all the flavor you want. But when you remove the person--the storyteller--and it is just you and your computer, the facts just aren't enough. We need some flavor, some context to help us evaluate the information and to make it useful.

I cornered Matt the other day because I'm re-reading an old article, "Collaborative Tagging as a Knowledge Organisation and Resource Discovery Tool" (Library Review V. 55; No. 5, 2006). The authors, George Macgregor and Emma McCulloch, discuss the pros and cons of tagging and controlled vocabularies. While they clearly favor the controlled vocabularies of the library world, they allow that tagging is a means for "exploring exhaustive subject areas before formal exploration."

Tags and evaluative content provide the context, the flavor, we need to help us zero in on what we're really looking for. Nothing beats a good reference interview by a librarian, but when it is just me and my computer, evaluative content works very well. And that's why I love working on WorldCat.org. We're bringing more and more evaluative content to the site to help Web users discover some of the flavor of what libraries have to offer.