Internet Librarian 2015, held in Monterey, California, October 26-28, 2015
Morph! Exploring New Roles & Directions for the Info Service Biz
700 pre-registered attendees (and another 100 anticipated onsite registrants) from 42 states and Washington, DC plus 17 countries. There were 148 speakers and moderators, and 20 exhibitors. All presentations can be found at
Each person spends an average of 11 hours a day interacting with technology.
Monday, October 26: I focused on the Opening Keynote Panel, and sessions on Discovery, Navigation & Search and UX & Web Presence.
Opening Keynote Panel: Exploring Roles & Directions: Creating, Failing, Learning
The three panelists explained their “disruptive entrepreneurships”, and shared their education products. 21 Toys (toys that teach empathy), littleBits (STEAM projects featuring electronic building blocks), and Hopscotch (creating games with coding). Panelists promote failure reports, embrace a fail forward work space, and encourage ambush learning by starting students out in kindergarten. Best analogy: most people just want toast. Toasters are okay, but how else do we get toast? We need to discuss what works, what doesn’t, what flopped, and decide what excites you, who is it helping and who is it serving?
Super Searcher Tips & Tools—Mary Ellen Bates
If you’re not failing, you’re not trying. You’re stuck in a rut and crashing is good. Highlights: search engine Millionshort asks “what haven’t you found? Eliminates results usually found on Google, Yahoo, and Bing, with the option of using limiters to further reduce results. Reverse image search engine Tineye works like Google Images or Bing Image match, but results come up faster without scrolling down multiple pages. Use Google Trends. The filters (based on your results) will glean more insight from “regular” web site searches and results. Aggregator Socialmention will offer real-time social media search and analysis.
LibGuides: Learning From Users’ Experiences—Denise FitzGerald Quintel
See O/Share/Information Services Council folder/Internet Librarian 2015
No one knows what LibGuides are—change the name (resource guide, research helper). Get over the “set it & forget it” mindset—we need to regularly monitor and update. Make them more discoverable, with consistent terminology. Get rid of the general subject guides—that’s why people go to Google. Work best when they identify unique and relevant resources—not just links. Split results on tabbed vs one page—not remember to use tabs vs busyness of page.
Search Results Are the New Black—Deirdre Costello—EBSCO presentation
dcostello@ebsco.com will share the public library findings via email.
Presenter explained results from a recent EBSCO survey, outlining the differences between doctors, students and public library visitors who took part in the survey. In general, public library visitors want to find a specific book, to research a big-ticket purchase, or to find resources that support their work. They are relaxed, focused, and feel a sense of community & ownership at their branch. This ownership extends to the library website as well. And unlike doctors and students, most public library visitors do not suffer from “eye byte culture”. They can tolerate bigger “chunks” of website information.
Negative results: MARC records / snippets are a struggle to interpret, and they don’t provide clues for credibility like Google results. Visitors still equate libraries with books. Library computers and databases are a hindrance. Visitors can’t remember their passwords and don’t want to validate logins—it gives them less incentive to persevere to find what they want.
Students in general like pdfs—recognize the icon/term as a shortcut to the full text article, know it can be downloaded and shared. They are confused by abstracts—if it’s online, they think they should be able to access it.
Working Out the Future of Library Resource Discovery—Marshall Breeding
Synopsis of the white paper he created for NISO. Public libraries should externalize functionality for mobile devices. Evaluate interfaces, coverage, resources. Look at the report / studies for additional information on the Open Discovery Initiative.
Presenter explained a project to use “Entity” records to identify a person, place, event, name of work, organization and concept instead of creating MARC records. By using VIAF (a Virtual International Authority File), catalogers work with canonical identifiers (assertions) to shred all records to include ALL manifestations of a work in the Entity record. SPPL is already creating “linked data ready” records. For additional information, see Library Linked Data in the Cloud. OCLC is hoping to collaborate with Wikipedia next. Individual entries will have a “snapshot” of a specific time, and a new photo will be taken for each update. When researched, each entry will be discoverable (a bibframe effect: an AND result, not ‘instead’). They will also employ Schema.org vocabulary for consistency.
Resources Discovery: In the Age of Wikipedia—Jake Orlowitz jorlowitz@wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library
Wikipedia has 8000 views per second and 500 million monthly visitors. Libraries are the perfect place to build Wikipedia specialists through the Wikipedia Library Interns program. They could link archives, initiate best practices, offer additional resources and help readers research.
--Jodi @Hayden Heights
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