Direct Me NYC 1940

Even better: since they developed it themselves, this information didn’t cost NYPL a penny. If they had asked a vendor to build a tool like this, it would likely have involved thousands of dollars in licensing fees, months of meetings and an expensive support contract. By building and releasing it quickly and by themselves, though, New York Public Library has created a tool that gives people a fascinating look into our past and saved money, too.

Hopefully, this will encourage more public libraries to take a chance on building useful tools themselves instead of just relying on vendors for everything.

Money quote (emphasis mine):

The user is not broken in that our job is to fulfill the user’s needs, and the user’s needs are, while not always well-defined, possible to meet, or understood by either side, valid — so accusing the user of Doing It Wrong is counterproductive to our goals and needs, and should be avoided. This applies to space usage, reference inquiries, customer service, and use of our online tools.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. Libraries need to pay a lot more attention to how our patrons behave and start adapting our systems to the way our patrons expect search to behave. Our seemingly in-built desire to force patrons to search for things our way is counterproductive and ultimately damaging to our credibility and our profession.

If there’s one point that I’d like to add to hers, it’s that a big part of the problem is that very few libraries actually take real responsibility for the software that’s used to build their site. By relying on external vendors and not having in-house coders who can improve the system, many libraries pretend that any deficiencies in it are minor and/or not their responsibility. But everything that happens under your logo — whether it’s on your website, at the Reference Desk or how you organize your stacks — is ultimately your responsibility. That means that, like it or not, it’s your job to make things as easy and intuitive for your patrons as you can. As Jenica so wonderfully puts it:

We can sit back, all of us, in libraries and outside of them, and with smug self-satisfaction explain why our tools, websites, spaces, and services are just brilliantly perfect… or we can thoughtfully observe our environment, acknowledge that the user has needs and is showing us what they are, and adapt.

A couple of months ago, I bought a domain, cpl.to, and set it up as a bitly Pro account, because I like the idea of having a special “shortlink” domain that I can use for tweets about CPL. However, I haven’t shared them anywhere but on Twitter and you might find these interesting or useful, so here are a bunch of useful links I’ve created so far.

Please note: Some resources will require you to log in using your Chicago Public Library card and ZIP code. They are marked with an asterisk*.

Basic Info

1. cpl.to/my-cpl*: Log into your CPL account from this shortlink, check the status of your holds, renew books and more.
2. cpl.to/pcres: Reserve a computer at your nearby branch right from the Web!
3. cpl.to/museumpass: Thanks to the wonderful folks at Kraft Foods, you can sign out passes at your local CPL branch that will get you and a few friends into many of the amazing museums we have here in Chicago…for free.
4. cpl.to/jobsearchers: Let’s be honest: it sucks to be looking for a job right now. CPL recently updated and relaunched its “Especially for Job Searchers” section, where you can get research careers, learn new skills, find out what goes into a winning résumé, find places in the city where professionals can help you and more. Hang in there!
5. cpl.to/reciprocalcard: If you live in one of Chicago’s many beautiful suburbs, you can still use CPL! All you need is a valid ID (or a recent piece of mail) and your suburban library card and you’ll be able to check out books, movies, music, museum passes and access all of our “members only” resources like our online research databases and downloadable audiobooks and ebooks!
6. cpl.to/teacherinthelibrary: If your kids need homework help after school, or if they just want a refresher on what they’re learning, CPL has fully-qualified teachers available after school at many branches.

From Our Catalog

1. cpl.to/whattoread: Looking for something good to read? Why not browse the many lists we’ve compiled of some of the best books in our collections?
2. cpl.to/chicagofiction: Chicago is a beautiful city, so it’s natural that authors would want to set their novels here. Take a look at this list of books set right here in the Windy City.
3. cpl.to/thehungergames: Are you a member of Team Peeta or Team Gale? CPL has Suzanne Collins’ amazing Hunger Games trilogy for teens…and that’s definitely real.
4. cpl.to/photographybooks: Looking to learn photography? CPL has tons of books that will help you release your inner shutterbug!
5. cpl.to/potterholics: Are you in Dumbledore’s Army? Do you wish you could go to Hogwarts? Wondering what Harry Potter stuff Chicago Public Library has? Look no further.

Research… like a Boss!

1. cpl.to/onlineresearch*: The main page for CPL’s online research tools. We’ve got newspapers going back to 1849, collections of scholarly journals, investment research, encyclopediae, science, history, biographies, genealogy and more!
2. cpl.to/chiltonlibrary*: Strapped for cash to give your car a badly-needed tune-up? Check out Chilton Library! Just select your car’s year, make and model and find out how to repair and service your car, check for recalls and more.
3. cpl.to/morningstar-db*: If you’re an investor, it’s important to have the best information at hand about the stocks and mutual funds in which you’re interested. Learn more about where to put your money with their incredible tools.
4. cpl.to/referenceusa*: Reference USA is a huge directory with more than 14 million US businesses and 89 million US residents listed. Great for stalking that high school crush who ditched you at prom!

Have You Visited a Branch Lately?

1. cpl.to/hallbranch: CPL’s classic George Cleveland Hall Branch (located at the intersection of 48th and Michigan) was a common meeting place for some of America’s greatest African-American writers, such as Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and Richard Wright.
2. cpl.to/waterworks: CPL’s new Water Works location, located at the Chicago Visitor Information Center on Michigan Avenue (and within walking distance of the John Hancock Center and the Drake Hotel) is a great place to pick up your book requests if you live or work between River North and the Gold Coast. It also has a small selection of popular works available for check-out.

That’s all I’ve got right now, but there are more coming and when I create one, I’ll be sure to post it on this blog.

iPhone. Android. Flickr. YouTube. Delicious. Goodreads. Meetup. Formspring. WordPress. Bit.ly. Github. Dropbox. QR Codes. Creative Commons. Twitter. Facebook.

All of these things have something in common: they are all technologies that Chicago Public Library (as well as countless other libraries across the country) should be embracing.

I’ve gotten a ton of work done in the last couple of days on what’s going into the social media presentation I’m working on, for which there will be both patron and staff versions. I am particularly excited about the one for library staff, which will focus on how libraries can and should use these technologies to go where their patrons are and to innovate quickly and cheaply.

However, it has not escaped my attention that the City of Chicago has some fairly draconian policies regarding the use by staff of many of these very same technologies. That flavor of irony is particularly bitter.

Folks, when the Library of Congress has a Flickr account I think it should be understood that librarians should be allowed use social media. Because we have to special collections. The curated selections.

And one of our major raisons d’être is to catalog every single item in them to within an inch of its life.

Because that’s how librarians roll.

Google spends millions and millions of dollars every year on tweaking their search results to make them better.  Engineers at Google constantly ask themselves:  How can we give people the information they want in as few clicks as possible?  Can we add context-relevant information such as a map, movie showtimes or images in order to make the search results more useful? In other words, Google would rather just give you the information you need if it possibly can, instead of sending you somewhere else.

When you search for something using a standard Google search (that is, at Google.com or through your browser’s search box), the search engine doesn’t separate relevant results, forcing you to click various sections of results. Instead, Google just gives you a list of the best results, depending on what you’re searching for and regardless of what type of result it is; consequently, a Google search results list will include links to web pages, maps, images, videos and more, all in one list. This “smart firehose” model works well for Google because it gives good results and then trusts people to make the right choice.

Libraries, in comparison, are woefully behind in search. Catalog searches are almost always totally separate from research information, so in order to find good information about, say, diabetes, a user will need to do multiple searches; one for the library’s catalog and at least one for the research databases. Often, users will need to go into several different research databases and perform individual searches.

Library users need a smart firehose.

Let’s start with how things are done right now by two libraries: Chicago Public Library and New York Public Library.

Fig. 1 (click to enlarge)

Fig. 1 shows the results we get when we use the search box in the top-right corner of the front page of Chicago Public Library’s website to search for the term “diabetes”.

The complete lack of results pertaining to research databases leaves the user totally ignorant of the top-notch information they could be getting. As it stands, no user will ever know, based on what they see here, that Chicago Public Library has access to lots of high-quality, authoritative information in the research databases.

It is also worth noting that even if a user chooses to use CPL’s Advanced Search page, no results from the research databases are shown. None.

Fig. 2 (click to enlarge)

Fig. 2 is a bit deceptive. While it looks like a lot of good information, it’s actually the same problem–from the opposite end–that we saw in Fig. 1. If the user does discover the link from CPL’s front page to online research (buried “below the fold” on the page for most users in a link labelled “Choose a Research Topic”) and follows that to the page for Health & Medicine research databases, they can then use the Quick Search box to do another search for “diabetes”, the results of which are seen here. Note, by the way, that the Quick Search does not include the Health and Medicine Reference Collection (which has several extremely good articles on diabetes) or Medline, both of which would be extremely useful to someone researching the topic.

The results here are good, though, even if it did take two difficult-to-find clicks to get to the right place from which to search.

Fig. 3 (click to enlarge)

New York Public Library does even worse. Using the search field on New York Public Library’s website and leaving “Everything” as our search type, we see this. Instead of getting the results we want, we get no results whatsoever; just a tally of the number of hits in each of the different collections. Users will have to click each link to see what results they’ve gotten.

These segregated results serve only to confuse the user. Why separate results? The business of a library is providing good information, so we shouldn’t be hiding (or worse, giving no clues to the existence of) authoritative information.

Now, let’s look at search done right by the reigning champion: Google.

Fig. 4 (click to enlarge)

Now, this is search done right. By going to Google.com and searching for “diabetes”, we are presented with these results. I would like to point out several things:

1. The number of results is off to the right, just above the advertisements, because it is almost incidental to the actual results.
2. The number of results are not separated into how many of each type of results were located. To Google, a good hit is a good hit.
3. The results include information from several types of sources, all presented in ways that are immediately apparent to users.

Google, of course, has a number of proprietary tools to create that list of results, collectively called PageRank.  No one outside of Google knows precisely what is involved in determining PageRank–something Google is, for various reasons, very anxious to keep secret–but from the company’s history, we have a rough idea.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s rough idea for determining how valuable a page on the Internet was that the more sites that link to a particular page on the Internet, the more valuable that page must be, hence an increased PageRank. Of course, PageRank has evolved considerably since its days as Larry and Sergey’s project at Stanford (then called “BackRub”).

Integrated library systems (ILSes) and vendor-supplied research databases have tools like this, too: the number of times a title has circulated and the number of times users have viewed a database article. Sure, truly intuitive ranking systems are more complex, but it’s a start.

But this brings us back to the original problems that this essay is determined to discuss. Why can’t results from the catalog and the research databases be merged into one list that gives users what they want, regardless of source? At the very least, why can’t a catalog search results page offer a link to relevant research databases when a user performs a search? (E.g., “You appear to have been searching for ‘diabetes’. Have you tried our health and medicine research databases?”)

Here is one last figure to consider:

Fig. 5 (click to enlarge)

The three default icons under “Are You Looking For?” have been supplemented with a fourth: “research databases”. (Excuse my oversimplified illustration; the icon is supposed to be a mortarboard hat, if you can’t tell.) Also, the first result is a hit from a research database, along with a paragraph  taken straight from an article, describing what diabetes is and offering a link to more information there. Users can immediately grasp that the first result is a relevant one and, entirely without requiring any extra effort of the user, more high-quality information is presented to them.

Integrating all of the information a library can offer in one easy-to-use list is a difficult task, but it is one that must be undertaken if libraries are to remain relevant and useful to patrons. This change would be a momentous one, since companies that make all different types of software–catalogs, databases and ILSes–would have to hammer out some sort of standardized API for these sorts of things. (This, though, is an expansive topic that is probably best left for a future essay.) It is, unfortunately, something which I fear may not happen for some years, by which time more of our “mind share” will have been taken away from us by Google. If libraries are to remain relevant, we have to put all our information at the users’ fingertips, regardless of source and with one simple search. We need our own smart firehoses.