Survey Needs Work

I asked the faculty about my survey. The computer science department head and the psychology department head, not surprisingly, seem to have a lot of experience with creating surveys. I’m going to use their suggestions to completely refocus the thing. The two most important questions when surveying about a service are: 1) how much do you use this service and 2) if these aspects of service were improved, would you use it more?

A lot of people were surprised that I gave the patrons the choice between books or furniture. Yeah. I guess I think some of the patrons would like to get rid of the books and put in some nice couches instead.

I probably won’t get to any of that stuff until after I get back from my summer break. In the meantime, freak yourself out with the presentations on this.

 

I made a survey at questionform

So far I’m only asking staff and full time faculty to look at it. It’s one of the free surveys you can set up at questionform, so it can only have 5 questions. I used up two questions asking if they read the newspapers and magazines.

The link for the survey is here.

Pretty cheeky, huh? Hopefully a billion people will check ’searchability’ and no one will check books or furniture and then maybe I’ll get a mega-incredible ILS. I contacted Talis in the UK, but they only serve the UK. Then I was looking at Polaris, but it’s still Windows based which means that any minute now they’ll go Web like Millennium and Mandarin, and when they do, everyone will need to buy the upgrade, right? Like when Vista comes out, then you gotta buy Vista. I can’t be buying the same library software twice.

BTW: Don’t think I mentioned it before, but someone from aNobii wrote me back. He appears to be the only person who has looked at my shelf. He says they are considering adding MARC data. He also said there’s no limit to how many books you can add there, but you can only “import” 500 at a time. LibraryThing seems to be working faster now with the queue. Time to fork over the 25 American bucks so I can put the rest of the catalog on there.

 

My Biggest Fear

I was tidying up the shelves and I found myself looking at the sociology section and I thought, “If I had the time, I’d read every single one of these books.” I wonder if they’ve ever been checked out in the history of this library? Impossible to know because there are no records!

My biggest fear is I’ll get an amazing ILS, I’ll get all 2.0 on everybody, and no one will care. I will build it, and no one will come. I guess if that happens, I’ll just take a pause and start reading those sociology books. In the meantime, I have to learn what librarians do and how they do it while managing a bookstore.

Too bad no one is reading this blog. I should start posting gossip about the students. Then I might get some traffic.

 

Last Day of School

Today’s the last day of summer classes here at Webster University Vienna. Next week will be quieter and I’ll be able to catalog a backlog of books piled up on the floor here. Maybe I’ll be able to explore this wiki I found today: Library 2.0 in 15 minutes a day.
It looks like just the kind of thing I need.

I’m still adding books to the aNobii shelf, just because it’s so easy, but I don’t think it will be so helpful for students really. They will start at our shelf, and then do a search with the search form on the top of the page there, and they’ll end up with a list of all the books in aNobii that match that term. The search just our shelf form is hidden away under a javascript rollover. LibraryThing works the other way around. From the “your library” page, you can only search your own shelf. Perfect. Another thing that is better, if your book doesn’t have a cover image, it doesn’t put up a big ugly ‘no cover image’ image like on aNobii. I guess aNobii want to pressure you to scan in all your covers, but I like the look of LibraryThing better. I think the aNobii page makes it look like our catalog is out of date, just because most of the books went out of print before the Internet took over the planet.

 

Between Meetings

I had a meeting this morning and another one this afternoon, but I was able to check the two online catalogs I’m building. aNobii seems to have no limits to how many books I can enter. I can enter 500 ISBNs at a time and when it doesn’t recognize something, it makes it easy for me to enter the information myself. LibraryThing came through and put 104 of the ISBNs I tried to import onto my shelf. Links to social information for each book are wonderful. I’m considering coming out of my own pocket for the USD25 to be able to enter unlimited titles.

Are there any other academic libraries doing this?

I was at a meeting this morning and I started blathering on a bit about user comments and social network sites. I got the feeling they didn’t know what I was talking about. I’m kind of nervous about letting my colleagues know that I’ve set up a blog and that I’m playing with these… what do you call LibraryThing? A social bibliographic site?

Well, got to run to my next meeting.

 

Our aNobii Page is Up

I set up the aNobii page just now. Much easier to enter multiple ISBNs than on LibraryThing. But I don’t like how the catalog looks on aNobii. On LibraryThing, it’s easy to list the books and see the Dewey codes. If my patrons see a book on our LibraryThing page and want to find it on the shelf here, they can just use the Dewey code. With aNobii, even when you click on the details of a book, you don’t see the Dewey code. So that’s a drawback for us. Also, LibraryThing shows the Anglo-American subject information. I don’t see that with aNobii. aNobii is starting to give me a big brother feeling, to be honest. They want to know what books I have, but they won’t give more information than I would already have. I guess “big brother” is “Web 2.0″’s middle name. Oops. There I go again.

On the other hand, aNobii is gorgeous. When I clicked on one of the titles on my shelf, it offered a link to view sample pages at Google. The information looks a lot like the Amazon information about the book, and at the bottom, there are links to buy the thing from Amazon. I already said how I feel about Amazon. Is aNobii just shilling for Amazon? How lame. I wish there was something better in the German Language Area, but so far, buch.de doesn’t have the selection.

LibraryThing is more uh, how do you say? sympathisch. It links to hippie stuff like bookcrossing, and small independent bookstores in New England. If I could just get some more of our titles on to it, I could start to form an opinion about searchability, which is what I’m really after. Searching aNobii is like doing an Amazon search of your own bookshelf. Not exactly what a librarian or a serious researcher is hoping for. Perhaps the “social information” and tags will improve all that, but the tags on LibraryThing are already much more detailed — for better or for worse.

I’ve sent some questions and suggestions to aNobii. I’ll let you know how they respond. Is it ethical to just copy and paste their responses into my blog? What is the ‘nettiquette’ about that?

Blogging right along here…

 

The Queue on LibraryThing

I’m trying to use the LibraryThing import feature. It’s supposed to pick out the ISBNs from a file and then automatically add them to my list. There’s a queue though. The first time I tried, it said there were just over 330 books ahead of me on the queue, and that it would get to mine in an hour or so. That was yesterday. After about 4 hours, it was still saying it would take about an hour to get to mine. Today, I checked again and it wasn’t any further. I thought, “Maybe it’s because I told it to take the information from Amazon.” So I cleared my queue, uploaded the same file again, and asked to take the book information from Boston University. Now it says I’ll have to wait 4 hours, that there’s over 2,000 books ahead of me in the queue. I guess I’ll peek back next week. If mass entering doesn’t work, then it might be too tiresome to enter the 7,500 items I have.

Another issue is that even if the catalog were up on LibraryThing, patrons wouldn’t be able to tell if the book is available yet. They’d have to contact me and ask. If I have time later, I will check out aNobii. Apparently, they have a some kind of feature that manages circulation. It’s meant to be for private libraries, for example, in case you can’t remember who has your personal copy of Iceberg Slim’s “Pimp,” and another friend wants to borrow your equally treasured copy of Donald Goines’ “Dopefiend,” you can keep track of that in aNobii, even get the website to automatically send reminders to your friend after a few weeks. At least that’s what they say. I haven’t tried it yet. Sounds pretty hot, though.

By the way, Amazon is virulently anti-union. If you’re in the USA, do your online book purchases from Powells. Guess I’d better add some kind of disclaimer about whose opinions this blog reflects blah blah in my “about” page.

 

Why a Blog?

I was looking at sites like LibraryThing and aNobii, and I was thinking they might be helpful for students trying to find books in the library. I’d like to know what others think and I thought I’d start a blog, get a LibraryThing profile going and see where all this takes the library. In the long run, I want to get some Library Automation Software. I’m really hot for a product called Millenium, but our budget just isn’t there yet. Anybody got a whole lot of money to donate? Some other questions we could talk about in a blog with comments are whether we need new shelves and furniture, what people think about our current loan schedules and fees, and maybe more general ideas about libraries, information science, English books in Vienna, the Webster Vienna Bookstore… okay, I guess that’s it for now.