Ballad in Plain E

I just had an excellent WebEx session and conversation with Kathy Bryce at Andornot Information Management Solutions. Andornot is offering free 30 minute consultations for clients until January 31, 2007 and I wanted to take advantage of it to learn a little about how to set up subject browsing for a new project I’m working on.

It never ceases to amaze me how much cool stuff you can do with Inmagic’s WebpublisherPRO, and Andornot is always finding innovative ways to make the software even better than it already is.

Kathy showed me two really nifty things:

1) Index pop-ups with dynamic query modification (find matches as you type) — check out Imagine Canada’s opac and click on the A-Z buttons for Author and Subjects — so slick!

2) Andornot Search Cannery (canned search generator) — this is going to save me hours of headache and confusion! Using this tool, it’s a lot easier to see how a canned query is assembled.

Kathy tells me we can tentatively look forward to a February Inmagic Users meeting, where they hope to demonstrate some new ways of generating and incorporating RSS into your catalogues/webpages. Can’t wait!

A colleague recently asked me whether we use FP Infomart for media monitoring (we do), and it got me to thinking about what a tricky thing it is to do right. You sign up with a commercial provider like FP Infomart or Factiva, and that can really save a lot of time. FP is great, and will be even better when they start picking up the Globe & Mail. I really can’t imagine what people did before these services existed (okay, I can, but it’s not pretty).

But of course, there are always sources that don’t get picked up by those aggregators, so you need to be diligent about checking other sources too. I’m using a combination of a couple of commercial vendors and free internet/search feeds, and that’s still not really enough.

Case in point: a couple of weeks ago, we were very embarrassed to find out that we missed a large supplement that one of our clients had published in the Vancouver Sun. Since it wasn’t news or editorial content–it was basically a large advertisement–it was not picked up by our commercial service. It would have taken a human actually looking through the paper to find it. So, okay, there are only four major papers to go through every day, but when you’re watching for news and ads that mention any one of scores of clients, it can get pretty time consuming. It’s not really efficient for anyone to do that, and would basically be a duplication of effort already being made by the commercial service. But still, being prepared when the client calls and asks “Did you see our article/ad/supplement?”…I hate to sound like a Mastercard ad, but that’s priceless.

‘Tis the season for sharing and whatnot, so perhaps we can compare notes. What’s your favourite media monitoring tool, and how do you catch those semi-obscure or easy-to-miss mentions and references?

As an afterthought, are there still companies where humans do this type of work, or is all done by computers now? Can we really provide good media monitoring without human beings vetting the results?

Big thanks to Courtney for telling me about A Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette (tag-lined “A polite librarian is a good librarian”.)

In a conversation with several other techs about names for us non-librarian library techs, she mentioned this post, which in itself is hilarious and whose comments are even better.

Scanning through the archives I discovered it’s pretty much all solid gold. I was going to go through and mention a few choice posts, but I couldn’t stop myself from choosing every other one, so trust me–this blog is awesome…ly amazing.

(OK, just a few:

Pencils, Supplying free

Tote bags, On hating

Signatures, Using email -although they missed the worst thing you can possibly do to your signature block: change it to Comic Sans

Caveman, Going )

How cool is this? The University of Winnipeg has a library toolbar, from which you can search for materials in various media, initiate live help, and quickly access search tips and library tutorials. I know it’s not the first library to offer one, but it’s the first I’ve ever come across while using a library’s site. While I couldn’t get it running for Firefox (they’ve not updated it for 2.0), it’s working fine in IE6.

I generally don’t use toolbars at all - I don’t like how much space they take up and prefer to visit an actual website to do my searching - but judging by how much time my friend Aaron spends at the UBC library website for his coursework, I can see how this would be a huge timesaver for students.

Actually, the whole U of Winnipeg library site is pretty sweet. They’ve got a Flickr widget featuring random slides from their “Library Tour” slideshow, CBC headlines via RSS, and they’re using a blog to publish news, events, and new titles.

Serious props to the U of W library team!

We had an exciting day in our library yesterday: we held a party to celebrate the launch of our firm’s photo archive, which our department developed and will maintain. The archive consists of photos from various events over the past 30 years and has some pretty priceless shots, many of which celebrate the excess of the 80s. I am so glad I was still in elementary school during that decade, and at least had a good excuse for wearing Spandex (I didn’t know any better!).

To help promote the event, we got the firm’s resident band, which includes one member of the Research & Reference department, to play a couple of songs: “Kodachrome” in honour of the photo archive, and “Werewolves of London” for Halloween (I veto’ed “Monster Mash”. If I hear that song one more time, I’m going to go insane.).

This was the second time we’ve worked a band gig into a library event, and it is PR gold - people had been asking when the next one would be since about two minutes after the first one ended. We made a really cool poster to advertise the party, using the movie poster generator at FD’s Flickr Toys, and of course, we followed the golden rule of library parties and baked six or seven dozen Halloween cookies and cupcakes to lure people in.

Most importantly, we are receiving excellent feedback about the archive, and it got people in the door. The archive, which we built with CS/Textworks and access via WebPublisherPro, is very easy to use, and while the interface is nothing fancy, I’m looking forward to adding a few bells and whistles when I get the chance.

A few months ago I borrowed an O’Reilly book called Ambient Findability from VPL. It was written by Peter Morville, who is a librarian and an accomplished information architect. I had only made my way through a few chapters when I had to return it because there were other holds on it, but I would really like to pick up a copy or borrow it again some time. At any rate, what I did read what really interesting and full of vivid examples of wayfinding.

Speaking of VPL, those black, recycled material VPL bags are everywhere: the Lululemon of the literati. Every time I turn around, I see one–on transit, on the Drive, in the mall…. I have four or five myself*, and when my mum saw them, she demanded I ship a few out to her. At $3, they’re a steal and a very practical way to support the library. You can get them at any branch or at Book’mark, the library store at the central branch.

Heh. Looking to see if anyone had uploaded a picture of a VPL bag to Flickr, I discovered that photos tagged “VPL” often don’t have ANYthing to do with the library. This discovery led to another: that Flickr has “clustering” that tries to separate disparate content that has been tagged with the same term. Neat-o!

*not that I’m calling myself a member of the literati–I just liked the alliterative effect!