Tag Archives: library technology

Faster is better

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When it comes to the Internet, faster is better, just about always. I have been thinking a lot about this since reading a post about this issue in the Official Google Mobile Blog a few weeks ago. In that post the author wrote about how Google used analysis of their search logs to see the dramatic effect of improving search response time for mobile users. If things are slow, they lose users. If things are fast, users want to use their service more.This one simple reality has so many big implications for me and for library technology. In an environment in which I feel constantly unable to satisfy user demands, where there is so much work that needs to happen in order to create a good user experience, it behooves me to focus more on this one thing. Make things go faster for users. Faster = happier users.I have spent time thinking about how true this is in my own experience. I am a bit of a new technology gadfly, willing to try new things and jumping from one to the other. Take for instance my web browser habits. I have used just about every web browser there has ever been, and also just about every version or iteration of them there ever has been. Overall I am most satisfied with Firefox and that has been my main browser of choice for a very long time. But I have tried Flock, Opera, and of course Internet Explorer. I know that IE is my absolute least favorite. So, OK: Firefox is mostly my favorite, IE is my least favorite. Sounds simple. But it isn’t. I can’t stop myself from jumping around to try others or different iterations of all of the above. For example I have used all different kinds of browsers on my mobile devices, different ones on my home computers, and still others on my work laptop. I am not 100% satisfied for long with any of them. Why? Well, there are a variety of reasons but one constant issue I have is speed. I want lightning-fast response time. Period. No matter what. Any delay is frustrating.This is why I have always played around with Safari, both for Mac and Windows. The earlier iterations of Safari for Windows were just awful. But even so, it was lightning fast, faster than anything else I’ve ever tried. I hate that I can’t customize it like I can Firefox. But I’m at the point now where speed trumps “like to haves”. Last night after reading some good reviews of the latest version of Safari for Windows (3.1), I decided to once again take the plunge and try. I am really happy with it so far. It’s early days yet and perhaps my fickle heart will eventually tire of it. But it is stable, and lightning fast, and that really counts for a tremendous amount in my book.So…I do believe faster is better, even with some caveats. It’s like the time back in the late ’90s when I moved away from dial-up to cable Internet access. I have never looked back nor wanted anything else but the fastest connection. I can’t imagine going back.We who work in libraries, especially with technology, would do well to simply try to make things work faster for our users. I bet we’d have a lot more happy ones if we emphasized this aspect of our online services more.

OCLC: the Microsoft of the Library World?

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Recently Roy Tennant joined OCLC and explained his reasons for taking this step in a post on the Library Journal: Digital Libraries blog. Roy is someone whom I admire and respect, a visionary and great communicator about technology and libraries. He has done, and continues to do, a huge amount of great things.

When I saw Roy’s posting I decided (maybe foolishly) to write a comment on it (see it here). In that comment I mentioned that while I respected his decision, I didn’t really agree that “OCLC is us” and I used that forum to label OCLC as the Microsoft of the library world. I had also used that characterization in a comment posted to The FRBR Blog a few days before. This drew the ire of at least one OCLC staff member who commented on how easy it was to use labels.

I have thought this way about OCLC for years. It isn’t something new that I came up with recently. To me, OCLC is an entity always to be reckoned with in terms of library technology in the same way that Microsoft is all-pervasive in personal computing generally. That doesn’t mean that all that they do or that their business model as a whole is laudable and always good for libraries. There are other comparisons that seem to fit, including what I think are over-priced services that most libraries seem to blithely accept without critical evaluation of whether they truly meet our needs, a fierce protectiveness of intellectual property that really doesn’t belong to them (in my opinion) in the first place but instead belongs with individual libraries who’ve actually created that intellectual content.

I think there are pros and cons in evaluating OCLC. My position, such as it is, is simply that we as a library community should be wary of monopolies of any sort, that we do not just accept without questioning the premise that OCLC’s approach is the best or in the best interests of libraries, and that we value diversity in terms of options for systems and services available to us in fulfilling the missions of our individual libraries.

Some interesting sessions at EndUser 2006

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I may work for Endeavor but I do not intend or want to be a free cheerleader for them here. Yet I can’t resist mentioning a list of presentations planned for EndUser 2006, Endeavor’s upcoming user group conference, that are squarely in the “sweet spot” of discussions that have been going on about social software in libraries (a.k.a. Library 2.0), making library data work harder, and using the ILS in new and innovative ways:

  • Ross Singer (well known as maintainer of the Dilettante’s Ball blog, frequent speaker and commentor on library/systems issues who works in library technology at Georgia Tech) will give a presentation on “Declunkifying your Z-Server: Implementing SRW/U, OpenSearch and other web services to your Voyager server”
  • “Social software (instant messaging, RSS, blogs, wikis, folksonomies, social bookmarking) and libraries” will be discussed by Edward M. Corrado of The College of New Jersey, and James Robertson of NJIT (New Jersey Institute of Technology)
  • Daniel Forsman of Örebro universitet will talk about “Extended features in webvoyage – forwarded searches and RSS feeds”
  • Adrienne Butler from Oklahoma Dept. of Libraries is going to give a presentation on “Writing A Search Plugin for WebVoyage”
  • “Mending the Gap between the Library’s Electronic [and] Print Collections Using [the] Semantic Web” will be the focus of a talk given by Amanda Xu, Andrew Sankowski, and others from St. Johns University

I am really looking forward to these and other presentations.

Use of the term ‘card catalog’ by Google

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Am I the only one who finds it incredibly irritating to hear or read about Adam Smith of Google Print, constantly refer to their digitization work as building a ‘card catalog’ of books? HELLO! Card catalog, it isn’t. Please do not refer to it that way, folks. Modern online catalog systems are nothing like the card catalog and, in my opinion, should not be referred to in that way. Not to demean the card catalog; it actually is/was a very useful tool that could/can be better used to find things in certain ways than an online catalog can. (E.g. I think a card catalog is a much more user-friendly tool for browsing than an online catalog will ever be.) I just think that those who continue to use the term ‘card catalog’ to describe an entirely different technology are displaying an irritating ignorance of the state of library technology these days. Most people have no clue as to how technologically advanced most libraries are these days. The use of the term ‘card catalog’ by people outside of our profession tends, in my mind, to reinforce the incorrect stereotype of libraries as backward and only concerned with print materials. This is just as negative in its own way as the eternal stereotype of librarians as spinsters with their hair in a bun, shushing patrons.

Also let it be known that I am not at all anti-Google Print. I heartily welcome this development and do not share the suspicious and/or distrustful attitudes of some librarian colleagues toward Google in relation to their work in this area. It will be quite interesting to see how their interpretation of fair use in copyright will play out. I think their pursuit of this digitization effort, including copyrighted works, will play a central role in redefining copyright law.