Goodbye to Dewey?

I've been reading Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. The theme of the book is that the virtual nature of digital information allows us to organize it in an almost infinite number of ways. But instead of making things more messy, it makes them easier to find.

Early in the book he talks about the history of the Dewey Decimal Classification System. Developed in the 19th century, it reflects the social atmosphere of the times as well as the personal background of its inventor, Melvil Dewey. Since he was raised in a predominantly Christian society and attended Amherst College (then an orthodox Christian school), nine major divisions in the religion classification are for Christian books. Weinberger writes, "Judaism occupies its own whole number (296) but Islam shares its number with two others, Babism and Baha'i (297)."

Using the system now can sometimes present problems. For example, there was no category for computers until the 1980s when editors renamed the "Generalities" category to "Computer science, information, general works." Weinberger writes, "Dewey's system puts phrenology (discerning personality by examing the bumpiness of the head; 139) on a par with Aristotle (185) and Oriental philosophy (181)." One oddball category includes number 137, for Divinatory graphology (predicting the future through handwriting analysis).

Now we read that the Gilbert Library library will be dropping the DDC. Instead the books will be shelved by topic, similar to the way bookstores arrange them. "(They)will be organized in about 50 sections, then subsections, from sports to cooking, gardening to mysteries. For example, a book on the Civil War would be in the history neighborhood and in the U.S. section." There's already a lot of speculation on library listservs about how this will work. Check the Publib archives under Subject search for "Good-bye Dewey."

Library 2.0 presentation for our Board

Daveman will be doing a short presentation on Library 2.0 at the next library board meeting. It's open to anyone and will be held on June 6 at 6:30 p.m. in the Carman Room. In 15 - 20 minutes I'll be covering blogs, RSS, wikis, social networking software, flickr and SecondLife and show how they're being used in public libraries. My part of the show will probably occur early in the meeting. This is a command performance. In my monthly report, which board members can read, I mentioned that I had attended a workshop on Library 2.0 with Stephen Abram. One of our board members was curious and suggested that the program.

This tape will self-destruct in five seconds

I love it when a patron comes to the desk and says, "You're too young to remember this, but...." Yesterday a man started off this way, then asked if I could help him find a video of the original Mission:Impossible television show. (Did I remember it? It was one of my favorite shows!)

Before I could look it up, he quizzed me, "Do you remember who was in it?"
I replied, "Peter Lupus, Greg Morris, Martin Landau and Barbara Bain."
"No," he said, "it was Peter Graves."
"Yes, but Peter Lupus played Willy, the muscleman. And for the first season, Stephen Hill starred, but was then replaced by Peter Graves. His character was shot during a gunfight in a cemetery in the final episode." (How on earth did I remember all this?)

I found the first season on DVD and placed it on hold for the patron. He was very pleased, smiled and shook my hand. Ranganathan's laws stress matching the book to the reader, but in this case I think we matched the librarian to the reader. (I put the DVD on hold for myself, too.)

A Response from AquaBrowser

In response to yesterday's post about the AquaBrowser word cloud, I was contacted by someone from its developer, MediaLab. He was very nice about the whole thing and said that I "certainly got their attention." He asked my opinion about having the option of minimizing or closing the word cloud. I think that could be a good feature, if only to save screen real estate. I'm also concerned about confusing our patrons with too many search options.

Let me also say that they are doing some interesting things with AquaBrowser. Today they announced that it can be run as a web-based service, which means that it could be always available. It's a very sophisticated search tool in many ways. I just get hung up on that word cloud! I've tried other similar graphical search tools and have had trouble with them, too. Maybe it's the way I'm wired. Here are some of them:

Kartoo
Quintara
Liveplasma

If you have access to an EBSCO database, it may offer a visual search that looks like this:



Everybody in the library biz is after the same thing; to explore ways to help people find what they're looking for. I know that's a priority for AquaBrowser and all library system companies that are using technology to make it happen. There are lots of new technologies that are becoming part of library systems and we're all looking at how to best use them. Sometimes I feel like Chief Brody when he said, "We're going to need a bigger boat."

Drinking the AquaBrowser Kool-Aid

Hooper: [trying to get the fishing line secure] It may be a marlin or a stingray... but it's definitely a game fish.
[Hooper pulls as the lines snaps and he crashes his head into the wall]
Quint: [picking up the line] Gamin' fish, eh? Marlin? Stingray? Bit through this piano wire? Don't you tell me my business again! You get back on the bridge...
Hooper: Quint, that doesn't prove a damn thing!
Quint: Well, it proves one thing, Mr. Hooper. It proves that you wealthy college boys don't have the education enough to admit when you're wrong.

OK, I've been dissing TLC's AquaBrowser Visual Search interface for a long time. I never liked the Discover "word cloud" and I still don't. First, we're asking our patrons to learn yet another way to search, when research shows that patrons want searching to be as simple as using Google or Amazon. TLC promotes Aqua as a tool for exploring, since it brings up other terms related to your search. It does do that, but bizarre terms tag along. For example, if you search for "vegetarian cooking," it brings up "meat." When I searched for "A Good Dog the Story of Orson," the book was first on the results list but the word cloud gave me such unhelpful terms as "girl," "boy," "house," "little," "friend," and "A 1/2." I'd be better off finding similar books by using the subject headings in the book's record but I can't search by them with this interface.

Finally, I think that in most cases our patrons don't want to explore; they want to find something. Most patrons do a broad search to begin with, using one or two keywords. In my opinion, the word cloud associations just give you a chance to get lost more quickly in color. But, now that AquaBrowser is online here, I will say for the record that it has some very nice features, apart from the word cloud. I can limit my results to Liverpool Library, a feature that bedeviled me in Horizon. My "vegetarian cooking" search contained links to Data Sources from our library. These led me to web sites in our Internet Subject Guide. Cool! The options for refining and the related subject headings are good, too. Aqua also has a link to create an RSS feeds based on my searches. And it's fast, too.

In the future, AquaBrowser will offer a feature called My Discoveries, allowing users to make lists for themselves or make public to help others; tagging; reviewing and scoring on any item (similar to Amazon's features) and personal profiles. I'm still a major fan of Polaris but AquaBrowser has some good things going.

Quint: Mr. Hooper, what exactly can you do with these things of yours?

Blue & White and Read All Over

The May 2007 issue of American Libraries features a photograph of Penn State President Graham Spanier's Read poster. It promotes my alma mater's Newspaper Readership Program that offers students the USA Today, the New York Times and a local/regional newspaper at no additional cost.

The goals of the program are to enhance the learning environment on campus; increase students' knowledge of community, national, and world events; to encourage a lifelong daily newspaper readership habit, and to create citizens who are more engaged in their local communities.

Big Changes at Google

Google has redesigned its main search page and its search results list. Instead of using separate search pages for photos, video, news, archived news, scanned books and other relevant sources, Google's universal search users will find links to all of those sources in a single search attempt.

This article from CNet News, Google Creates Uber Search Site, has lots of information on the new Google.

Mac vs PC

Today I started my desktop iMac and my Tablet PC at the same time. For the first hour, this is what I accomplished with each one.

On the Mac

• read and sent e-mail messages
  
• loaded iGoogle and Google Reader; read items from at least a dozen news sources and blogs
  
• revised wireless presentation that I'll do next week
  
• checked for software updates
  
• checked progress of approaching thunderstorms
  

On the PC

• bupkiss
  

None of its programs, not even System Restore, will come up. I have restarted at least 6 times, the hard way, by pressing the power button. My goal was to download the lastest security updates from Microsoft. IE tried to start but locked up 3 times.

VWs and Toast

I used to own a 1988 VW Gti. I loved that car. It was fast, looked great, handled well and had a very comfortable ride. As it aged, however, it developed a problem that no one could diagnose. Once in a while it would start running rough, e.g. jerking and sputtering. The problem could be remedied if I pulled over, turned it off, chanted a haiku, then turned it back on. After that it would be fine for months.

I remembered this as I was helping a patron who was trying to burn a CD of photographs on one of our Macs, using the Toast TItanium program. We tried repeatedly but kept getting weird error messages, ending in "The disc could not be burned." Finally, I shut the program down, then restarted. It worked! Our tech guy always says, "The first line of defense is to restart," but I didn't want to restart the whole computer if I didn't have to. Luckily, the easy fix worked, although who can say why?

Exalead & Google

I've been experimenting with a new search engine, Exalead. (They say you're supposed to use one engine for a while to learn it well, then switch to another.) I like the way it brings up related terms and other search options next to the results list, and the preview thumbnail is a nice feature. But I'm bemused by some of its search results. I like to do the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle and when I get stuck, I use the Internet to find the answers. I'm not proud. Last Sunday, one of the clues was "Italian librettist Gaetano." It was 5 letters and started with R. A search on Exalead found links to Donizetti and Berenstadt. When I did the same search on Google, there was Gaetano Rossi, at number 1 on the hit parade.

Recently I've learned that, as long as I'm logged into one of its services such as Gmail or GoogleReader, Google keeps track of my searches and web browsing. Eventually, it will tailor its search engine results to reflect more closely the kinds of things I'm interested in, based on what I've searched for previously. I'm OK with this, really. Google doesn't know that it's me or have any identifiable information about me. By allowing them to monitor my activities in this way, I can get more relevant information delivered to me. The trick is to log out of Googleland when I'm doing a search for a patron, so my preferences don't influence what I find for them.

Why Not the Worst?

In the December 2006 issue of American Libraries, David Isaacson wrote an editorial titled “Don’t Just Read—Read Good Books,” in which he encourages librarians to recommend quality literature rather than, say, romance novels to patrons. In Sunday's New York Times, author Joe Queenan weighs in with his essay, "Why Not the Worst?" Along with his typical sarcasm, he writes, "Bad books have an important place in our lives, because they keep the brain active. We spend so much time wondering what incredibly dumb thing the author will say a few pages down the road. One caveat: As with bad movies, a book that is merely bad but not exquisitely bad is a waste of time, while a genuinely terrible book is a sheer delight." Whether you agree or not, he makes some interesting points. Free registration is required to read the article.

The Independent, a British newspaper, has an article titled The Complete Guide to Booktowns. It talks mainly about Hay-on-Wye in Wales - a former market town with 1500 people and more than 40 used bookstores. My wife (who is also a librarian) and I visited Hay several years ago. We loved it, although we spent three days there and didn't even get to half of the stores.

In the early 1960s, a man named Richard Booth bought the burned out castle in the town center and opened a bookshop. He was trying to revive the rural economy and encouraged other booksellers to open shops there, too. Booth was quite a character; in one publicity stunt he declared that Hay had seceded from Britain, then crowned himself King and made his horse Prime Minister.


Paul Collins has written a wonderful book, titled Six Pence House, about the time he worked for Booth while trying to find a suitable place to live. For more strange but true stories about Wales, I recommend The Bank Manager and the Holy Grail, by Byron Rogers.

You can see some of my photos from Wales, including Booth's castle and other bookshops on my Yahoo photos page.

Polaris and the Dirt Dawgs

I read a lot and I'm always looking for relationships among the things I'm reading. I love it when different sources, while talking about different subjects, nevertheless address a common theme. This "harmonic convergence" happened again this week.

I've been reading Jerry Remy's Watching Baseball. Remy's a former second baseman for the Red Sox who now calls the games from the press box for the New England Sports Network. In his book, he talks about the "Dirt Dawgs;" the guys who just like to play. "I like to watch guys give the same effort when they're down by ten runs and when they're ahead by ten runs." he writes. "I can't stand guys who mail it in. The only thing you can control in the game is your effort."

Then this comment appeared on John Blyberg's blog.
"Some people also just don’t like to step out of their comfort zone. They don’t want to absorb new things. I was on a top technology trends panel at OLA last January when someone asked, “what if we don’t want to learn about all these new technologies?” (paraphrase). I don’t think I was in the mood for hand-holding because my answer was, “it’s your job.” Really. I don’t believe libraries are life support systems for staff. We need to work for our bread. That means that we have so stop bunting and try to knock it out of the park every single time. That takes passion, and too many people in every industry, including libraries, lack it."

Then, last Sunday our local newspaper ran a feature called "Top Ten Ways to be Happy at Work." They took it right from this web site:
Top Ten Ways to be Happy at Work.

Number 3 on the list is :Take Charge of Your Own Professional and Personal Development." It reads, "You are the person with the most to gain from continuing to develop professionally. Take charge of your own growth...You have the most to gain from growing - and the most to lose, if you stand still."

How do these three items relate to each other? Our county libraries will be moving to a new catalog system from Polaris in the fall. It'll be a wonderful improvement, but it'll involve learning a lot of new processes. Training has already begun and there's much more to come. But no amount of training will cover every situation that will come up. There will be times when you'll feel like you're down 10 runs. Be imaginative and resourceful. Try something! As Remy would say, "Make an effort!"