Responding to feedback collected last year from students and staff, our fabulous Library Systems team spent this summer making changes to SuperSearch and the online catalogue.

From the start of Semester One 2009, searching for a journal article or library book should now be much easier and faster. We have also created links between the catalogue and other systems so that, if an item is unavailable at Melbourne, you can easily request an inter-library loan without abandoning your current search.

There are a few problems we can’t yet fix. For example, you may still need to retype your password occasionally when using SuperSearch – but we have significantly reduced the number of times this is likely to happen.

Students, staff and alumni can access SuperSearch and the Library catalogue directly from the Library’s home page, or via the Learning Management System (LMS). The main catalogue is also available to the public.

Bouquets, comments and suggestions for further improvements are always welcome – email  info-futures at unimelb.edu.au to let us know what you think of the SuperSearch and catalogue searches.

The Library Systems team can help you become a ‘power user’ of the University Library’s online catalogues and resources.

The group’s Library IT Tips (LITT) blog offers advice on using library systems, discussions about new features, and tips and tools for improving your Library search-fu. Add it to your feedreader or visit regularly to find out what’s new.

Feel free to comment on any posts of interest to you — the Library Systems team would love to have your feedback!

In an Ockham’s Razor talk on ABC Radio, Sydney-based science writer Peter Macinnis describes his own ‘fact fossicking’ behavior when researching material for a new book about Australian explorers:

“I wanted to look at the ways Australian explorers worked, to examine and describe what they took with them, how they used it, what they ate and drank, what medical treatments they used, and I knew this information was in the journals that all the explorers kept, and most of them published in the 1800s.

“I have a major gripe about the way new science gets into schools. Thomas Kuhn said it first but I have adopted it: new science textbooks are written by regurgitating old science textbooks, with little reference to new finds or ideas. Most scientific advances take 30 years or more to even be noted. As a textbook writer and general science writer, I’ve always tried to go back to source, even when that made me read research that caused my brain to hurt…

“Many of the gems that I gathered… were in libraries like Sydney’s Mitchell and Adelaide’s Barr Smith, but the bulk of my material came from one brilliant source, Project Gutenberg, and in particular, from the Australian arm of that organisation. Technology delivers what we need to get the full picture.

“I downloaded 5 million words of journals, all scanned, processed and proofed by volunteers. I culled to make a database of about 1 million words, 5-1/2-thousand selected passages, each linked to the explorer, a date, a source and a set of keyword codes. Explorers often called crocodiles alligators or caimans, and some used curious spelling as well. I needed the keyword codes if I was ever going to find the themes…

“Keeping it brief, I took text with line breaks, used word processor macros to format this into paragraphs, used other macros to add extra fields to my chosen passages, separated by tabs. I exported them to a spreadsheet, where more fields were added or calculated, to allow sorts and searches. Later, I used a spreadsheet to generate the Visual Basic code to convert my keyword codes to plain English, and then put that code into a word processor macro before exporting the translated codes back to the spreadsheet. I also used the spreadsheet to generate an HTML version, a full-on database and a word processor version.

“Then I could start writing…”

Library and computer science staff at the University of Minnesota have been thinking about how students create and manage a ‘personal reference library’ as they go about their scholarly work:

“Digital library users collect, enhance and manage their online reference collections to facilitate their research tasks. These personal collections, therefore, are likely to reflect users’ interests, and are representative of their profile. Understanding these collections offers great opportunities for developing personalized digital library services, such as reference recommender systems.” (Extract from “Resolvability of References in Users’ Personal Collections,” published in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, October 2007) (hat tip to Lorcan Dempsey)

 Amazon.com’s recommender system and Google’s AdWords advertisements use a similar approach. Automating the collection of data about user behavior is technologically straightforward; analysing the large quantities of data requires lots of computer power but again is relatively uncomplicated from a technical perspective.

University libraries already collect data about usage of collections and individual titles. The magic comes in asking the right questions about that information: of the people who read Book A, how many also look at Journal B? Does the content of Journal B have any similarities to that of Book A? Would the Book A readers benefit from being offered a ‘quicklink’ to Journal B?

Lorcan Dempsey observed in 2005 that, unlike Amazon.com and Google, university and public library systems “have low gravitational pull, they do not put the user in control, they do not adapt reflexively based on user behavior, they do not participate fully in the network experience of their users.”

The Minnesota study provides empirical evidence that investing in enhancements to library systems could provide substantial benefits to our students and academics.