Tag: Database management systems

#ERcamp13 at George Washington University

“The law of two feet” by Deb Schultz

This is going to be long and not my usual style of conference notetaking. Because this was an unconference, there really wasn’t much in the way of prepared presentations, except for the lightening talks in the morning. What follows below the jump is what I captured from the conversations, often simply questions posed that were left open for anyone to answer, or at least consider.

Some of the good aspects of the unconference style was the free-form nature of the discussions. We generally stayed on topic, but even when we didn’t, it was about a relevant or important thing that lead to the tangents, so there were still plenty of things to take away. However, this format also requires someone present who is prepared to seed the conversation if it lulls or dies and no one steps in to start a new topic.

Also, if a session is designed to be a conversation around a topic, it will fall flat if it becomes all about one person or the quirks of their own institution. I had to work pretty hard on that one during the session I led, particularly when it seemed that the problem I was hoping to discuss wasn’t an issue for several of the folks present because of how they handle the workflow.

Some of the best conversations I had were during the gathering/breakfast time as well as lunch, lending even more to the unconference ethos of learning from each other as peers.

Anyway, here are my notes.

Continue reading “#ERcamp13 at George Washington University”

NASIG 2012: A Model for Electronic Resources Assessment

Presenter: Sarah Sutton, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

Began the model with the trigger event — a resource comes up for renewal. Then she began looking at what information is needed to make the decision.

For A&I databases, the primary data pieces are the searches and sessions from the COUNTER release 3 reports. For full-text resources, the primary data pieces are the full-text downloads also from the COUNTER reports. In addition to COUNTER and other publisher supplied usage data, she looks at local data points. Link-outs from the a-to-z list of databases tells her what resources her users are consciously choosing to use, and not necessarily something they arrive at via a discovery service or Google. She’s able to pull this from the content management system they use.

Once the data has been collected, it can be compared to the baseline. She created a spreadsheet listing all of the resources, with a column each for searches, sessions, downloads, and link-outs. The baseline set of core resources was based on a combination of high link-outs and high usage. These were grouped by similar numbers/type of resource. Next, she calculated the cost/use for each of the four use types, as well as the percentage of change in use over time.

After the baseline is established, she compares the renewing resource to that baseline. This isn’t always a yes or no answer, but more of a yes or maybe answer. Often more analysis is needed if it is tending towards no. More data may include overlap analysis (unique to your library collection), citation lists (unique titles — compare them with a list of highly-cited journals at your institution or faculty requests or appear on a core title list), journal-level usage of the unique titles, and impact factors of the unique titles.

Audience question: What about qualitative data? Talk to your users. Does not have a suggestion for how to incorporate that into the model without increasing the length of time in the review process.

Audience question: How much staff time does this take? Most of the work is in setting up the baseline. The rest depends on how much additional investigation is needed.

[I had several conversations with folks after this session who expressed concern with the method used for determining the baseline. Namely, that it excludes A&I resources and assumes that usage data is accurate. I would caution anyone from wholesale adopting this as the only method of determining renewals. Without conversation and relationships with faculty/departments, we may not truly understand what the numbers are telling us.]

CiL 2008: What’s New With Federated Search

Speakers: Frank Cervone & Jeff Wisniewski

Cervone gave a brief over-view of federated searching, with Wisniewski giving a demonstration of how it works in the real world (aka University of Pittsburgh library) using WebFeat. UofP library has a basic search front and center on their home page, and then a more advanced searching option under Find Articles. They don’t have a Database A-Z list because users either don’t know what database means in this context or can’t pick from the hundreds available.

Cervone demonstrated the trends in using meta search, which seems to go up and down, but over-all is going up. The cyclical aspect due to quarter terms was fascinating to see — more dramatic than what one might find with semester terms. Searches go up towards mid-terms and finals, then drop back down afterwards.

According to a College & Research Libraries article from November 2007, federated search results were not much different from native database searches. It also found that faculty rated results of federated searching much higher than librarians, which begs the question, “Who are we trying to satisfy — faculty/students or librarians.”

Part of why librarians are still unconvinced is because vendors are shooting themselves in the foot in the way they try to sell their products. Yes, federated search tools cannot search all possible databases, but our users are only concerned that they search the relevant databases that they need. De-duplication is virtually impossible and depends on the quality of the source data. There are other ways that vendors promote their products in ways that can be refuted, but the presenters didn’t spend much time on them.

The relationships between products and vendors is incestuous, and the options for federated searching are decreasing. There are a few open source options, though: LibraryFind, dbWiz, Masterkey, and Open Translators (provides connectors to databases, but you have to create the interface). Part of why open source options are being developed is because commercial vendors aren’t responding quickly to library needs.

LibraryFind has a two-click find workflow, making it quicker to get to the full-text. It also can index local collections, which would be handy for libraries who are going local.

dbWiz is a part of a larger ERM tool. It has an older, clunkier interface than LibraryFind. It doesn’t merge the results.

Masterkey can search 100 databases at a time, processing and returning hits at the rate of 2000 records per second, de-duped (as much as it can) and ranked by relevance. It can also do faceted browsing by library-defined elements. The interface can be as simple or complicated as you want it to be.

Federated searching as a stand-alone product is becoming passe as new products for interfacing with the OPAC are being developed, which can incorporate other library databases. vufind, WorldCat local, Encore, Primo, and Aquabrowser are just a few of the tools available. NextGen library interfaces aim to bring all library content together. However, they don’t integrate article-level information with the items in your catalog and local collections very well.

Side note: Microsoft Enterprise Search is doing a bit more than Google in integrating a wide range of information sources.

Trends: Choices from vendors is rapidly shrinking. Some progress in standards implementation. Visual search (like Grokker) is increasingly being used. Some movement to more holistic content discovery. Commercial products are becoming more affordable, making them available to institutions of all sizes of budgets.

Federated Search Blog for vendor-neutral info, if you’re interested.

css.php