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| | Is there such a thing as a lib tech guru?Published on 2008-04-22 I’m hesitant about how fashionable the now popular title “Evangelist” really is. In my mind, harshly put, an evangelist is a prejudiced, narrow minded, message driven, company edged fan boy. Do I think of Matthew, Mark. Luke and John? In a way, yes. But, of course, I am trying to make a point. Guru, for me is maybe more of an appropriate "title" of somebody who has the relative knowledge to be an authority of foresight in their area. Wikipedia: “In a further Western metaphorical extension, guru is used to refer to a person who has authority because of his or her perceived secular knowledge or skills.” I do not think Marshall Breeding would present himself as a library technology guru but in my mind he is among the strongest contestants. At the 2008 Computer in Libraries Conference he summarized the necessary development of the libraries “public interfaces” (his expression): - Decoupling of the front end interface from the backend - A single point of entry of services offered by the library - Print and electronic resources - Metadata and fulltext - Local and remote (metadata) - Relevancy ranked results (users expect the “right” stuff first) - Facets, clusters, for narrowing the search - Query enhancement (“Did you mean?”) - Suggested related results (similar titles) - Locally created content - User-contributed content - Navigation “bread crumbs” - Single sign-on and personalization options We will come back on the “Locally created content “ in a blog close to you. Read more at http://www.librarytechnology.org/
No romance and a lot of humourPublished on 2008-04-21 This is about a coming product, BookDesire, so you know. With some provocative (?) questions in the end. I want a feelgood novel with a lot of humour but please no romantic nonsense. I want a thriller with a lot of excitement but please no brutal violence. I want a new thick fantasy novel for youths with preferably a girl as main character for my eldest daughter? And when I find one, I want similar ones. This kind of service has not been available to our knowledge. There is Whichbook in UK but it is not, as we understand this, close to what people are asking for. We want to build a service which is directed to exactly the kind of needs people have walking in to the library or wondering about what book they should give away as a present. We are cooperating with some algorithm geniuses at Ideon Research Center in Lund because this solution needs a lot of mathematics even if it seems simple enough using it. We now have about 2000 titles for the mentioned three genres in the prototype. We will renew and expand this yearly because this kind of service has the novelty need and touch. It is possible to use it from the web as a standalone web page or integrated in the library interfaces (Arena). It is available from cell phones for the moving seeker or from terminals for those who like touch controls. So the technicalities are in place. We do have a lot of questions though. What genres should be the first after the existent? Is it necessary that a chosen title is available in the local library? Do you have any qualms this being definitely not a scientific precision instrument? It will be based on very subjective input (from librarians or librarian students). Is it ok that end users can change the values? Is it then ok that a logged in end user has a lesser saying than the librarian? And what relation would that be? 10 end user matches one professional? Pleased to get your comments!
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