Library Gazette

Vufind has been live for just about 2 months now. In that time we have gotten 118 feedback emails detailing bug reports, enhancement requests, and personal opinions about the new system. It has been a busy fall for the systems staff and we are just now finishing up the fixes on a few of our big Vufind issues. One of our biggest problems has been consistent record updates. I am glad to report that we are now running daily loads into Vufind. We will shortly be introducing daily deletes as well. Full index regens still take 20 hours and we have yet to figure out exactly how frequently we need to do that. The full index regen time depends more on our record export, modification, and transfer from our Voyager system at the moment (Vufind takes about 3 hours to index the 1.6M records).

Our other major issue has been system stability. I appreciate how patient everyone has been while we iron out the issues that cause Vufind to go down so frequently. We are still working on this but hopefully have allocated enough RAM to the server and enabled the system to ‘clean-up’ after itself so that Vufind can remain responsive even during moderate load (fingers crossed - we have not had any downtime since the last modifications a week ago - many thanks to Jeremy Kindy for helping us work through this!). An interesting thing that IS found recently was that Google was responsible for 1/3 of our vufind traffic (we have now blocked their robot) :).

The Vufind community as recently created a new administrative organization and is working towards fixing many of the bugs that we have listed. When the community releases the official 1.0 release we will upgrade! In the mean time we will continue to work on our end and contribute back to the community where it is valuable. The list of enhancement requests, bugs, and fixed issues below represent all of the feedback that we have gotten so far. They are broken down into three categories, unresolved enhancement requests, unresolved bug reports, and resolved enhancement requests/bug reports.

Enhancement requests

• Would like to be able to see how many hold requests exist on an item in the new catalog
• Would like the new catalog to explicitly state which series or version an item is (example Mi-5 season 1,2,3)
• Add year into results listing
• Add journal option to basic search
• Add the ability to see 20, 40, 60 records per page
• Improve serial current issues display - right now it shows item level detail but not summary holdings
• Add ability to preserve certain facets (like library) when doing searching
• Add grouping to locations (All physical reference locations for example)
• Add the ability to click on call numbers for browsing
• Reduce the number of clicks to get to information
• Add data to the results screen including publisher information, dvd season info, pub place/date, etc
• Implement Spell Check
• Make subject headings work the same way that authors do - via listing at the top of the screen
• Make subject hierarchy work more consistently - united states history is a good example
• Add a new items feature to vufind, particularly by subject or call # range
• Would like to be able to replicate all brief record info in vufind

Bug Reports (Partially resolved or Unresolved)

• Location listing should be in alphabetical order, should be consolidated in certain cases (ref desk and reference for example) - still working on figuring this one out.
• Advanced Searching does not work with more than 2 terms, truncation proves to be problematic, further advanced searching returns inconsistent or known to be incorrect results when compared to the old catalog. One suggestion would be to remove advanced search and have advanced search link to the old catalog. There has been alot of discussion about how appropriate this. ..any thoughts? please leave comments!
• Item statuses in voyager not always reported as desired in Vufind (missing books showing up as lost), lost showing up as overdue. This is going to require some advanced item status processing in the Voyager driver and will take some time
• Date sorting not working as desired
• Recently received issues do not have a location? - We need some clarification on this
• Endnote Export not working
• “I hate vufind” - While a very real problem there is no specific bug fix for this. We may want to discuss re-introducing our “classic view” in a more prominent place to alleviate this issue
• Vufind does not always return what I search for - We have lots of reports of this. Sometimes Vufind has the record but it is not on the initial screen. In some other cases the record is not in the system. There are a few things we are working on here, first daily data loads will address recent titles. Second, we have a list of 22K records that did not import that we need to troubleshoot. Finally - we may need to think about the default search algorithm.
• Save to favorites, email functions do not have polished javascript/ajax interface, require scrolling, etc
• Name authorities are not consistent, cary grant, shakespeare return different result counts from old catalog
• ISBN searching does not work (looks like vufind is not parsing out the - during indexing and as such needs it for the search
• Improve holds/recalls

Fixed Issues

• Catalog slows down/crashes under ‘heavy’ use - Some lib100 classes of 15 people have seen some slow response times - We have worked with IS to try to resolve these issues. We have increased the amount of RAM allocated to the system, tuned SOLR settings, and searched the logs for memory leaks. Hopefully this has been resolved.
• Call Number now shows at the top of every view of the record
• Library links not always proxied appropriately - Kevin implemented a workaround for now
• Ebooks now showing as available
• Military Science added as location
• Sometimes the 007 in items (item format) does not correspond to what the item actually is. These items should be reported when identified and will be fixed by cataloging
• Known items not always showing up - We have a number of specific reports here. In some cases this is due to a lag in indexing (still working on getting the connection between our two servers opened up) but in others the items were kicked out due to record errors.
• Call number searching should not include periods - makes it difficult - resolved
• Resources without Item records in catalog show incorrect status of Checked Out - We have a workaround for this but it requires addressing each location specifically in the code. If you still see errors please send them to me
• Collections not synchronized, items in old catalog not in new - daily updating is in place, working on daily delete. It currently takes 20 hours to re-index our catalog from scratch
• Wake Forest University facet limit does not return records (It is in essence a useless facet since everything in the db has this tag) - item removed from list.

The long months of planning and scheduling is all done tomorrow but right now things are getting busy!

Many thanks to Carolyn and Tim who spearheaded the T-shirt brigade - they look great! Pre-registration pick-up begins at 2pm in the all night study room. There is still plenty of time to come pay your $$ to race!

The Google Books settlement stemmed from lawsuits related to the Google Books digitization project. The original settlement from October 2008 has seen alot of opinion and criticism in the last year. Below is a short list of sites that cover the developments:

1. Google Books Settlement page
2. ZSR Library blog entries discussing the settlement
3. Timeline of developments on Cnet
4. The EU perspective on Google Books
5. NyTimes coverage
6. Editorial by Sergey Brin

In teaching teaching we will discuss some possible uses of Google Books as a teaching topic in Information Literacy courses. Some ideas for using this topic to guide class include:

1. Doing research on current events
2. Evaluating ‘news’ type resources on websites (for example comparing Cnet and Reuters coverage)
3. Discussion of Copyright issues surrounding digitization

It has been just over 2 weeks since we pulled the trigger and switched our catalog view over. We have gotten lots of great feedback and ideas for improvement and I thought I would take a moment to gather this feedback together and talk about next steps.

General Impressions

Comments from our patrons have varied from being impressed with the faceted browsing options to being frustrated with the limited information displayed on the default record page. Perhaps not surprisingly, There were some uses of the old catalog that do not work the same in Vufind (for example the display of the number of holds on a record). There has been some expectation that Vufind would go further in being more ‘Amazon’ like in how it indexes and displays records.

The list of enhancement requests, bugs, and fixed issues below represent all of the feedback that we have gotten over the last few weeks. We are working to resolve the bugs (foremost among them the speed issues and advanced searching) and will keep you posted with new news.

Enhancement requests

• Would like to be able to see how many hold requests exist on an item in the new catalog
• Would like the new catalog to explicitly state which series or version an item is (example Mi-5 season 1,2,3)
• Add year into results listing
• Add journal option to basic search
• Add the ability to see 20, 40, 60 records per page
• Improve serial current issues display - right now it shows item level detail but not summary holdings
• Add ability to preserve certain facets (like library) when doing searching
• Add grouping to locations (All physical reference locations for example)

Bug Reports (Unresolved)

• Catalog slows down under ‘heavy’ use - Some lib100 classes of 15 people have seen some slow response times
• Location listing should be in alphabetical order, should be consolidated in certain cases (ref desk and reference for example)
• Advanced Searching does not work with more than 2 terms, truncation proves to be problematic, further advanced searching returns inconsistent or known to be incorrect results when compared to the old catalog
• Resources without Item records in catalog show incorrect status of Checked Out - We have a workaround for this but it requires addressing each location specifically in the code, further statuses in voyager not always reported as desired in Vufind (missing books showing up as lost), lost showing up as overdue
• Date sorting not working as desired
• Recently received issues do not have a location?
• Wake Forest University facet limit does not return records (It is in essence a useless facet since everything in the db has this tag)
• Call number searching should not include periods - makes it difficult
• Endnote Export not working
• Still working on fully automated index updating

Fixed Issues

• Call Number now shows at the top of every view of the record
• Library links not always proxied appropriately - Kevin implemented a workaround for now
• Ebooks now showing as available
• Military Science added as location
• Sometimes the 007 in items (item format) does not correspond to what the item actually is. These items should be reported when identified and will be fixed by cataloging
• Known items not always showing up - We have a number of specific reports here. In some cases this is due to a lag in indexing (still working on getting the connection between our two servers opened up) but in others the items were kicked out due to record errors.

The NYT has a interesting update on the status of the GoogleBooks legal issues this morning. There are some curious tidbits in the article including a mention of a “book rights registry” that Google asserts will coordinate rights payments to publishers.

Of note, the article also mentions the Europeana Digital Library, a multi-institutional repository of all sorts of digital materials.

On Wednesday the Z. Smith Reynolds Library implemented a new discovery system for their library collections. The system, developed initially by Villanova University, employs innovative indexing and searching techniques to help patrons find and interact with library resources.

This new tool adds the ability for patrons to discover new relationships between resources through the use of faceted browsing, a technique which is commonly used on web-based stores such as Amazon. It also introduces new community-focused features such as the ability to add comments and tags to catalog records. These features allow library patrons to easily discover resources by combining several limiting criteria (such as format, location, and publication date) using dynamic links on the results page.

The system complements a suite of locally-developed and open source information systems that the library employs including the New Book/Film Walls, WakeSpace (a digital library of WFU collections), Book delivery and reserves services, and library-sponsored blogs and wikis for the university community.

Over the last few weeks, Kevin, Jean-Paul and I have been finalizing the release of our Vufind implementation by working through the list of issues and observations submitted by library staff in our wiki. We were able to resolve many of the issues but did choose to hide/work around certain functions that had too many problems to resolve in our current release. For full details on what was fixed, what was missed, and what we decided to leave for the next release you can hit the bottom of the page

The most recent load ran into a number of data issues related to the addition of a few pieces of information from the holdings and item records into the index, most notably 30 or so records that had invalid MARC tags which would kill our export scripts. In all, out of our 1.7 million records, only 11718 of them errored out. This represents less than .7% of our collection. We will have to address these errors before those records can be loaded.

Please take a few minutes and check out the current system. One of the neatest (in my opinion) features of the system is a broken out list of all of our libraries. We were able to generate this using our holdings data (which is included in another list). This means that we can now have a dedicated catalog for the music, and education, libraries not to mention our own popular video collection.

If you have additional feedback or bug reports - please submit them in our wiki using this link. There will be a staff presentation on Vufind on Tuesday at 3pm in room 476 during which you can find out more about the system.

The familiar hype cycle report from Gartner has been released for 2009. The NY times published a nice summary article that highlights some of the findings (including where Gartner stands on Twitter).

Of interest to the library techies may be the report on cloud computing. Cloud technologies on the rise include Cloud-based email and enterprise wide use of cloud computing while both virtualization (running multiple ‘computers’ on a singe set of hardware) and Software as a Service (Saas) are both rising on the ‘Slope of Enlightment’ according to Gartner. A great example of SaaS is our Serialssolutions subscription.

Another interesting report focuses on trends in higher education. Items rising on the list include digital preservation of research data, use of open source software, and mobile learning while Cloud email is just emerging from the ‘Trough of Disillusionment.’

There are reports on all sorts of information issues and topical areas so head on over to the full report & enjoy. To get into the above links, first visit the Gartner login page. After that each of the above links will take you directly to your resource.

On Monday Barry re-assembled the equipment in the Multi-media lab following a several week-long refurbishment of the space.

The lab has been re-configured just a bit to make better use of the space but everything else is pretty much as it was. Shortly though we will be installing a brand-new digitization machine procured as with Grant funds from our recent LSTA Outreach grant.

Come on down and check out the new carpet, new ceiling and re-painted (I promise) walls!

Serendipity was my tried and true method of research as an undergrad. It was a perfect method - lacking structure, motivation, and purposeful direction I used what information fell into my lap to write research papers :). This morning, the NYT published a short piece on the role of serendipity in online information seeking this morning that I thought might be of interest.

The article discusses how Twitter has re-designed its site to encourage more searching & serendipitous discovery. There is an interesting connection here to what Tim Westergren discussed during his talk at ZSR last year about the difference between crowd-generated opinion and expert created metadata and the role that those two sources of information play in unexpected discovery of new information.

I do not think that the Pandora model and the twitter model are entirely in sync with each other but it is curious to see how central a role the idea of serendipity plays in discovery systems.