#cam23, Extra Thing 4: Libraries widget

I tried out the Cambridge Libraries Widget last summer, and the RSS feed and Calendar feeds when they were launched. I can see that they'll be really useful to some people, but somehow they just don't do it for me.

So I'm going to tell you about something that I do use a lot, and is applicable to readers outside the Cambridge bubble. Did you know that you can customize the search box in your browser? And did you know that Copac (the UK National, Academic, and Specialist Library Catalogue) is one of the things you can add?

How to add the COPAC search to your browser

1. Go to http://copac.ac.uk/, click on 'Interfaces' on the right hand side, and then 'Search Copac from your Web browser search bar using 'plugins' (or follow this link to go there directly).
2. Click on the type of search you'd like to add.
3. That's it!
4. You should now be able to choose the COPAC option from your browser search box.
5. You can edit you search box and add/remove search providers. In Internet Explorer go to Tools>Internet Options>'Settings' next to 'Change search defaults'. In Firefox, click on the drop-down arrow in the search box and then on 'Manage Search Engines'.
6. If there are other sites you search frequently, it's worth having a look around to see if they have a browser search option.  As well as Wikipedia and Amazon, I have a German dictionary and the OED, in my search box and and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography search that runs from the bookmarks toolbar.

I'd love to hear of any favourite search box/bookmarks toolbar tools that you use.

Five thousand un-findable objects (a librarian's whinge)

The BBC/British Museum series 'A History of the World in 100 Objects' (AHOW) came to an end recently. A significant part of the project was the public submission to the series website of objects with personal historical significance. Some of the these objects were showcased in short 'audience stories' features on the radio in the final weeks of the series. One of these features described a family story very similar to my own family story - a story that I've rarely, if ever, before heard mentioned in the media. It was surprisingly affecting to hear this tale one morning in the middle of the Today Programme, and I was moved to go an investigate the AHOW website to find out more about the object at the centre of the story.

There are lots of excellent features on the website - it was very easy to locate the page for the object in question as it was one of the week's featured items, and alongside a picture and some text was the recording that I'd heard on the radio. Website users can also log in and leave comments on each object, and some seem to be doing so.

So far, so good. I found the object, and found out a bit about it. Then I got adventurous and thought I might look for other objects with similar stories. The 'Explore' section of the website comes in two flavours: a flash-powered spiralling timeline version, and a list version. I'll be linking to the basic list version because I'm not sure if everyone will be able to view the flash, and the lists are easier to work with anyway.

There are several things I don't like about these 'Explore' pages, and I like to think that this reaction is born from annoyance that a good website isn't more useful, and not just some boring librarianly desire for catalogues to be complex. My complaints are as follows:

• there is a range filters (for location, theme, culture, size, colour, material, time period, contributor type, and BBC area), but you can only refine the results by only one filter (plus a time period) at a time.   You can look for purple things from 1925-1950, or cloth things from 1925-1950, but not purple cloth things from 1925-1950.
• the time periods are also fixed, so you can't narrow down a search to a known date or range of dates, you can only find everything from 600 to 200 BC, or 1600 to 1700 AD, but not items from 1325-1425, or 1966 only, or whatever.
• the geographic categories are rather broad: UK, Europe, East Asia, Africa, Middle East, Pacific and Australia, North America, South Asia, Central and South America, South East Asia, America, and Central Asia.
• there's no free-text search, so you can't search for a specific place (or name, or object): you can only browse using the broad filters described above.

These restrictions make it difficult to retrieve an object that you know is there, and they also make it very difficult to search for objects of a specific type (to see if there are any more from country x, for example). If you're interested in a single country, town, or region, you have to wade through tens or hundreds of results to find what you're looking for. There seem to be over 5,000 objects on the site (100+ pages in this list, each with 50 results on them), and that's quite a lot of wading.  This makes me sad. There's a treasure trove in there, but I just can't work out how anyone could investigate it well.

What does Update say about CILIP?

[Update, 1 July 2010: Elspeth Hyams, Editor of Library and Information Update, has asked that I post this response.  Please do take a look.]

A theme in some quarters of the CILIP Conversation, and certainly of our conversation in Cambridge, has been the perceived inadequacies of the CILIP publications.  I must confess to not being an avid reader of either Gazette or Update, although I do try and flick through each issue to keep up with what's new.  I don't think that the content is necessarily as engaging or relevant as it might be, but I haven't yet managed to form any definite ideas about what I think would be better.  This post is about the medium itself, and what message it conveys.

It's the online versions (CILIP membership required) of the publications that have attracted my attention, and not in a good way. I shan't enter into debate about whether its better to have CILIP publications in hard copy or online, except to say that there certainly should be an online version available.  And given that there is an online version, it really ought to be good.  As one of the main means of communication of CILIP with its members, I really expect the magazines to embody some of the ideas and principals that librarians and information professionals are implementing and promoting in their work.

Do Update and Gazette currently meet this ideal?  To my mind, no.  Last month I took some time to read through Update online, and I found several things which I think could, and should, be done better.  They fall into two broad headings: interface and searching.

Interface

• The Flash interface might look flashy, but I really don't understand what we as readers gain from having animated page turns, and even the sound of the page rustling as it flips over.  This kind of effect is just naff, as far as I'm concerned.  We all know what turning a page looks and sounds like, and the content would work just as well, if not better, without it.
• The Flash presentation isn't just a bit naff, it's also slow.  Not everyone has a high-speed connection to a high-speed computer.  Making people wait for pages to load will just lead to them not reading the magazine.
• The interface isn't just naffly presented and slow, it's actually inaccessible to many.  Flash isn't supported well on all operating systems (honk if you use the latest Ubuntu release), won't be installed on all computers (and in a work setting, it might not be possible to have it installed), and readers with motor and/or visual difficulties might not be able to use it at all: there don't seem to be keyboard shortcuts for all the functions, and Flash can't be interpreted by screenreaders.

I'm clearly not the first person to have raised these concerns with CILIP, as they are partly addressed in the online Update FAQ:

3. I access the internet at work where we don’t have Flash and I’m not able to install it. How can I access Update?
Flash is an industry standard software solution. Some organisations require their staff to make a valid case before they will install Flash on networked computers, so this is a good opportunity to do so. Update Digital delivers high-quality information of direct relevance to members’ work activities, and access to it is restricted by log-in.
If it is not possible to have Flash installed on your network computer, it may be possible on a laptop or netbook. Otherwise access may need to be from your home pc or laptop. Longer-term we are investigating whether Update can be provided online via Apple’s iPhone/ iPad or Smartphones.

4. I have a disability (e.g. visual impairment/poor motor control) and find that I cannot use Update Digital. How can I access Update?
You can zoom in and magnify the text by clicking on the page. You can also print all the pages by going to Menu and choosing Print pages. When the thumbnails have loaded, choose Select all to print all the pages. Our software developers are working on speech-activated controls and text-to-speech, but these are not yet available.

I find these answers dismissive and patronising. CILIP ought to be making obvious efforts to make its magazine content available to as many of its members as possible, seeing as they have paid for it, rather than implying that members' complaints are unwarranted. There are other 'industry standard' solutions that could be used for the dissemination of online magazines that have better accessibility options for disabled people, and which are more widely supported.  The suggestion that CILIP have people working on making the current interface accessible via speech-activated controls and with text-to-speech capabilities is confusing.  These are solutions that are already available in other platforms (an HTML version of the magazine, for example) why are CILIP trying to re-invent the wheel? 

Searching
Assuming you can gain access to Update in the first place, can you find what you're looking for inside it?  Well, the online-only issues have a clickable contents list, although those issues that appear in print form too, don't (although the weblinks in those versions can be clicked).  But even without a clickable contents list, finding items in an individual issue isn't too onerous.

Electronic publications really have the edge over print when it comes to searching archives: the possibiliy full-text searching ought to make it possible to find whatever you want.  This isn't really the case with Update online.  For starters, two different search boxes appear depending on where you are in the interface.  When you're in the archives page, click the 'search' button in the bottom right, and a small, Google-style search box appears.

But when you're looking at a particular issue, click on the search button now at the top right, and a better search box is brought up, with options to limit searches and witha  help screen explaining different search possibilities including phrase searches and truncation.  Optimistically, and interested in what CILIP had to say about the recent merger of archives bodies, I entered a search for 'Society of archivists' with limits of 'all editions', and requesting the results bedisplayed 'by edition'.  I was hoping that 'by edition' would give chronological sorting, but alas, not.

The results appear to be grouped by edition, but the order of the editions is obscure: some Masters supplements, Jan-Feb 2010, March 2009, September 2009...  It carried on like this on the second page of results, although today the same search returns no results at all.  If there's logic here it's too advanced for me.

So, what does Update say about CILIP?  In the context of high-quality retireval and display options available for many online publications, Update Digital say to me:

"We're not interested in reaching our full audience, and we don't want you to be able to find anything in the archive".

No wonder librarians and information professionals are so infuriated with CILIP!

[Update, 1 July 2010: Elspeth Hyams, Editor of Library and Information Update, has asked that I post this response.  Please do take a look.]