twofortyfive: Yale University Library

iTunes for PDFs? Better Yet, Last.fm for Research.

2008-12-15T14:54:00Z

The library had a presentation from Victor Henning, a founder of Mendeley.com, a new web site that aims to help researchers communicate with each other and discover new research. Victor described the concept of Mendeley as a Last.fm for researchers -- that is, a social network that aids in discovery of relevant material. In the case of Last.fm (as many 245 readers will know) that material is music. In the case of Mendeley, that material is scholarship -- mostly in the form of published articles. Mendeley was launched this fall and already has over 1,000 users. Users can sign up for the free service and download the desktop software at the company's web site. Victor described the service as being in active development and is soliciting input from librarians and researchers.

Happy Thanksgiving

2008-11-25T17:28:17Z

Still waiting for a picture of Barack Obama holding a fluffy puppy? Snuggle up with a library cat instead! The story of Dewey, a resident of the public library in Spencer, Iowa, and the subject of a recent broadcast on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, makes me feel particularly warm and fuzzy. Though Yale can’t have a library cat, due to the requirements of a reference collection and the allergens of students, we at twofortyfive still love cats who love books. You can find your local library cat here, or just enjoy my family’s very own library cat (yes, we do have a lot of books), Oberon, who is pictured above. Reference may make him yawn, but he loves tearing apart crosswords and trying to eat corn muffins.

I personally think Yale might be uniquely suited for an unkindness of library ravens, but given that they might remove the fingers of a few patrons, we’ll probably have to stick to just having a blog. At this point, we at twofortyfive, and Oberon (anticipating turkey) wish you a very happy Thanksgiving—hopefully involving good food, good books, and very little in the way of overdue fines!

An Open Letter to David Foster Wallace

2008-11-19T20:13:20Z

Dear David Foster Wallace-- I am sorry you are dead. I am sorry for the loss of your family. I am especially sorry that Michiko Kakutani¹ never really got you, which made me disregard her reviews for longer than necessary after Infinite Jest came out. I am so especially @#$&ing sorry that you won’t be here anymore to process the overwhelmingly schizoid, over-stimulating vast Technicolor² splat of a world that we live in. You made me laugh until I cried about dealing with cockroaches, Canada, the concept of tennis,³ life and death and college admissions, of all things. But best? of all, you gave us back the footnote.⁴ So now that you’re gone, I have to deal with my footnotes. Categorize, organize, not screw up royally, biliographize them. Despite certain research librarians⁵ who like other software, after you died I clung to RefWorks like the sensitive bookish lover I never had.⁶ I felt compelled to find all your works on WorldCat and make a bibliography for myself, one that was online and therefore immortal.⁷ I forgot my password as usual, but luckily for me I had taped it to my wall with that especially cellophane-y tape that looks organic but isn’t.⁸ Apropos of nothing (or maybe everything) this tape reminds me of tapeworms. Okay, I know the internet isn’t the solution to everything, but RefWorks does help me cope with the Sea of Overwhelm.⁹ I had a really annoying project in high school English class once where the teacher marked us down if we messed up a single comma in MLA.¹⁰ RefWorks would have saved my flailing word processing skills and my “style” grade. It will format in any style, from the conventional (Chicago, APA, &c) to the wacked (Wiener Tierärztliche Monatsschrift-Veterinary Medicine Austria).¹¹ It doesn’t make the world make sense but it does make it all clean and Linnean.]]> 12 I grieve for you David Foster Wallace. I’m sorry my coping mechanisms are pretty pathetic.¹³ I’m selfishly sorry that We, The World, didn’t get any more books from you. Oh yeah, did I mention that I’m sorry, I’m pretty sad, and oh god, I miss your prose already? R.I.P., David Foster Wallace. I need to go compile some reference material. Reverentially, Alex ¹ Incidentally a Yale Alumna. ² Word insists that I capitalize this because it is a trademarked term. Who knew? Well television people, probably, but not me. By now you now know I’m a book person who caves for Battlestar Galactica and PBS period dramas. ³ In which I was completely otherwise uninterested. ⁴ C’mon, you already know who “us” is. Big scary readerships that like anonymous hardbacks with brown covers along with eating odd things at weird times and thinking too much. ⁵ Hello to you, too, Greg Eow. ⁶ Or, uh, a dead stick in a flash flood--which is probably a more appropriate metaphor. ⁷ You can export directly from WorldCat to RefWorks. Also, Google announced it is putting its data on GIANT FLOATING BARGES. Seagulls can now land on bibliographies and the old gmail I refuse to delete. You would have liked this, I think. ⁸ Yale insists that we do this, i.e. have different usernames and passwords for our RefWorks accounts than our general Yale accounts, which I guess makes sense, but my god, I can only come up with so many permutations of “SontagGirl87.” ⁹ ¹⁰ As if I wasn’t OCD enough? He also insisted that every college professor in the universe as we know it would hate me if I ever messed up MLA. Mmmhmm, right, so here I am happily using Turabian and MAA. But don’t think I don’t value citation! ¹¹ Doesn’t this make you want to write an odd, taxonomically-themed short story about Austrian veterinarians? ¹² Software, even really good software, will never make me roll on the floor, my belly aching, about paranoid cruise ship vacations. It will never know somehow EXACTLY how it feels to look at a group of people waiting and watch them all whilst taking strangely observant notes like a stalker. ¹³ What did you want me to do, smoke in a hidden heating pipe and consider your fate? Well probably, but research is how I deal with things. I can’t hit a tennis ball, or for that matter, a basketball served to me like a tennis ball.

Thank you, Captain Obvious

2008-11-18T17:36:00Z

In what I recall as the early years of middle school, one of the most witty-seeming, usually cutting ways of conveying information was the “Captain Obvious” meme. As in “Captain Obvious says those purple pants look bad on you” (bite me Jennifer! I’m still smarter than you!), or “Captain Obvious sent a memo to the crew. Brad is SUCH a slacker.” When I was administering a survey for twoforytfive’s office about the usability of YuFind, our beta search engine and a new alternative to Orbis, I had a visit from the esteemed Captain Obvious. Captain Obvious thinks that “YuFind” is a dork-ass name for a search engine. I got this response from a startling percentage of the people who sat down to take the survey. So here’s a few answers. First of all, YuFind was not, to my knowledge, a specific response to the pronoun + verb construction “you find.” It was named after the VUFind interface at, wait for it, Villanova University. This is why people on the library staff still sometimes call it “VUFind,” which confused me for a while. As a result of this, I say “V-yu-Find” with a vague Eastern European and/or Yiddish accent. Vyufinds could be a type of woollens that schulmps wear while eating latkes in the shtetl. When the Cossacks assaulted the shtetl, they took your long-suffering ancestors’ Vyufinds. But, given that it is not a High Holy Day I have once again failed to observe, we are open to suggestions. Or at least some prodding. Here at Library Blogging Spaceship Battlestar Obvious, we listen to the Captain. We know “YuFind” is unappealing, we get it. What do you want us to name it instead? Son of Orbis? I’m not promising anyone will actually change YuFind’s name, but I do promise I’ll check my email and the comments on this post and convey your responses above the Undergraduate Minion level. Meanwhile, all of you, esteemed readership, can mentally tell Jennifer that she was dead wrong about my awesome purple corduroy pants. xoxx Lieutenant Blogger “Pirate Prentice” Obvious

Yufind Survey Results

2008-11-17T20:05:03Z

Recently we asked for help from our patrons to improve a new, alternative interface for the Library's catalog, Orbis. The alternative we've been working on is called Yufind, and we asked patrons to try it out and then answer a few questions on an online survey. We received 83 responses and the results were that 75.6% found what they needed when they searched Yufind. 57.8% of respondents preferred Yufind to Orbis, but when asked for the first place they would turn for a book search, slightly more respondents would turn to Orbis than to Yufind (40.2% to 35.4%). Some respondents indicated they were frustrated by the broad search in Yufind, which in some cases returned many highly irrelevant results, and by slow response times. Other respondents were unable to use Yufind to locate items they knew to be in the collection, such as the journal Nature. One of the new features of Yufind is faceting of results. Facets are a way of showing results in various subsets: for example books could be grouped by authors, topic, or era. Respondents who tried facets tended to like them (85.0%). One person noted

My initial search query was too vague, but the facets helped me find exactly the book I needed without having to go through pages and pages of search results.

Those who didn’t like facets commonly complained that results were oddly not related to their search or took too long to load, and when this happened the results could be annoying:

The results or offerings in the facets menu were not related to what I searched for. This means that the menu is not helping, but just taking up valuable space on my screen.

One thing that annoyed several respondents was the Yufind name.

I think I prefer the name "Orbis." The name "Yufind," seems a little contrived.

There aren't plans yet to come up with a different name, and this might be something people will have to suffer with. Others saw real problems with it in general and thought that time would be better spent improving Orbis itself and the links between the Library's web site and Orbis. Often these negative comments were linked to searches that Yufind did not do a good job with. A better search is about to be implemented, and hopefully these searches should now function well. The new search will be narrower and will exclude those records that may only match one word in a search query. This should also make facets function better. Among the other improvements that should be considered for Yufind, usability results indicated that facets should be presented in a list that the reader could manipulate with an alphabetical sort. This sort option should be implemented. A search of the Yale collection should be more accurate so that very popular items such as Nature (as measured by holdings, circulation, or downloads) are easily located in the Yufind search. This type of customization to the Yale environment would help to improve Yufind’s standing as a search interface for Yale readers. Another area where Yufind could distinguish itself would be by integrating seamlessly with other Yale services. Candidates would be easy export to Refworks/Endnote and ordering book delivery via Eli Express or interlibrary loan. The benefit of this emphasis in the Yufind implementation would be to provide a service that other search engines such as Google could not easily provide, thereby establishing the Yufind interface as a reasonable alternative for some Orbis users. Overall survey results indicated that while Yufind is viewed as promising, it needs significant improvement. Thanks to all who submitted a survey; this is a big help to us and we in the Library take all the feedback very seriously. One lucky person, Elizabeth Mata--class of 2010, entered a response to the survey and was selected to receive an iPod Touch. Congratulations Elizabeth! More results are available in this full report.

Dewey Defeats Truman?

2008-11-03T20:19:44Z

As you may remember, Dewey did not defeat Truman. Here’s where we would put the ProQuest Historical Newspapers edition of the Chicago Tribune that Harry Truman held up when he won the election. But the thing is, we can’t seem to find it! Yale databases, no matter how wonderful, aren’t always complete—the paper Truman had in his hands was the first edition, not necessarily part of the scanned files. Proquest does have lots of papers--Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, and the LA Times (see this last one if you are interested in reading about the original election that lent its name to the famous "Bradley Effect"), but apparently not all editions are digitized. We’re on the edge of our seats reading the polls and staring at the electoral map here at twofortyfive, but while you’re waiting, you, like us, can make use of LexisNexis to read up on the entire arc of this election. And find out if your coworkers/roommates/deans have committed any felonies. Because that’s what we're about here, freedom of information.

“Girls, Girls, Girls!” Women, Women, Women!

2008-10-29T18:50:00Z

On Februrary 14, 1969, in an article entitled “Girls, Girls, Girls!” the Yale Daily News questioned a fundamental change in Yale’s climate. How could Payne Whitney Gym remain a bastion of nudism when women were coming? Those women, always bringing up issues, challenging your masculine classroom environment, making Yale install co-ed housing, and god forbid, limiting the sacred exercise space in which you can proudly display your dangling Spartiate netherbits! Oh men of Yale, the very thought! Today at Yale we have a new Dean of the College. She, Mary Miller, is a woman. She’s nothing like the picture below the 1969 article, captioned “Our Lady of The Cross Campus.” Yes, she’s probably heard Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” but instead of being its Manic Pixie Dream Girl object (thanks, NPR/Onion/Jezebel), she’s the authoritative voice behind the reading of the song. She’s an expert in Meso-American art, and considering the closest I’ve been to an Inca temple in the rainforest is walking in my Miami back yard in my explorer-a-licious cherry red Doc Martens, she could easily kick my ass. She is a woman of scholarship and authority. I think she could have very well taken on the male doubters of 1969, and the fact that she is steering the college forward today is a testament to our evolution from a bastion of Old Boy sexism to a center of equality, tolerance, and feminism. We all know Yale’s not perfect, and the YDN archive testifies just how far we’ve come, and how far we have yet to go. Hopefully, Dean Miller will take us there. And as a feminist who has also just written a fashion piece for this blog, I might add that I hope she takes us to whatever socio-political state “there” is in chic, lacquered English safari hats, Aztec inspired prints, and maybe, just maybe, a pair of this fall’s glam rock studded leather heels that the men of 1969 couldn’t walk in if they tried.

Copyright in the Digital Age

2008-10-20T16:26:51Z

Librarians are increasingly concerned about new restrictions being put into effect on use of copyrighted material, especially digital material. Of special interest for those who care about the ability of libraries and scholars to share copyrighted material in ways traditionally allowed (such as scholarly research, parody and political discussion) is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. When the U.S. Congress passed DMCA in 1998 it was argued that the act was necessary to prevent the illegal copying of music and video. Since its inception DMCA hasn't stopped illegal pirating of copyrighted material, but it has been used to discourage libraries from preserving digital materials, as preservation requires copying. Although libraries do have an exception allowing such copying for material when they own an item, they cannot preserve networked resources or web sites. Additionally, researchers have been challenged in presented findings that companies argued would hurt their technical ability to discourage illegal copying of digital material. In a new twist, an original supporter of DMCA, Senator John McCain, has complained to Google's Youtube site that a video it had created was improperly removed from Youtube when copyright holders complained that a political video produced by the McCain campaign violated their rights under DMCA. Under provisions of the DMCA, copyright holders have the right to demand that content be removed (a DMCA take down notice) if it improperly contains their material. The person who posted the video must be notified, and if they think they were within their rights to use the material they then may ask a further investigation. Youtube has 10 to 14 days to respond to such counter claims. The McCain campaign argued that there should be a quicker determination when political comment is involved, an argument that Youtube rejected. New York Times--McCain Fights for the Right to Remix on YouTube Electronic Freedom Foundation

What's in this box?

2008-10-17T21:00:00Z

We take them for granted now, those ubiquitous little rectangles. They've become so common, such a part of the argot of modern life that they often don't need labels or "submit" buttons. Search boxes, of course, are a bit more complicated than they actually seem. And as with many things, a simple search box masks a wildly complex mechanism -- at least if it works well. Whatever its shortcomings, the most famous of search boxes, the Google Search box is certainly simple. Its simplicity seems at odds with its almost clairvoyant ability to find what you were looking for. The elegant simplicity does allow for the introduction of some complexity through the "advanced search" screen or the use of modifiers like site: or inurl:. Still, the results seem never the same twice and Google is constantly tweaking the math that drives the search results: fighting linkfarmers and overzealous search engine "optimization" and adding new data types like images, videos and geographic information. Library search boxes, on the other hand, haven't changed much since the advent of the online catalog, so named because it was an online version of the card catalog, itself a huge leap forward from the bound catalogs that preceeded it and the scrolls that preceeded them. Libraries have not spent a great deal of time or effort improving search results and often our first inclination as librarians is to make the search box (or boxes, or entire screen) more complicated. This can lead to better results: what librarians call "greater precision" but it does require quite a bit of precision on the part of the searcher as well. More on precision another time, perhaps. Part of what makes today's simpler search boxen work is what librarians call high recall. Which is to say they find a lot of stuff. Mountains of stuff. Things that have nothing to do with what you want at all. What makes this work is the ability of the math driving the search box to move the things that are the closest matches to the top of the result list. And that's where the magic is: in the ability of math to determine relevance from a soup of words. So library catalogs have traditionally had high precision and (within the bounds of that precision) very good recall (typos and missing or misfiled cards could prevent recall even with perfect search terms - and you were generally limited to three subjects per book). Library catalogs have, until quite recently, lacked any sort of relevance ranking. This, it could be argued, is because librarians painstakingly select each item in the library collection, therefore what you find is what we deem best. (I can hear you bristling now, clever students and brilliant scholars all.) In today's world this simply will not do: first, you can and should judge sources for yourself and second, we simply have too many items in too many disciplines from too many sources to suggest that you can search them all with perfect precision. Besides, perfect precision doesn't work at all with full-text sources. And you want to search full-text sources, don't you? Since I'm well past making a long story short, I'll simply say that we do get it. Search is hard to do well, but we are trying. Take a look at Yufind, our experimental catalog -- "discovery tool" is the buzzword among the libraryland cognoscenti -- let us know what you'd like to see. We're working on it.

Book Couture: Yale Library Treasures For Fashion Week

2008-10-15T20:00:05Z

Coco Chanel, photo by Man Ray

Since we’re all Recessionistas this season, here’s a quickie post matching some of Yale’s unique resources with this season’s collections as shown at Bryant Park this fall. These books, people, are often more rare and more exquisite than a vintage Lacroix cocktail dress, and they look *way* better on you, trust me. Besides, Anna Wintour will never scowl at you in the Beinecke Reading Room, and no one wears sunglasses.

Erin Fetherston "Gazette des atours de Marie-Antoinette : garde-robe des atours de la reine : gazette pour l’année 1782." (LSF) GT865 .G38X 2006 (LC) Diane Von Furstenberg "Vieux sequins et vieilles cuirasses : pour piano / Erik Satie." (SML Music Library) M25 S253 V4+ Oversize Lacoste “White wings : a yachting romance ... / by William Black.” (Beinecke) 1973 483 Betsey Johnson “Peter and Wendy, by James M. Barrie. Photoplay title, "Peter Pan." Illustrated with scenes from the photoplay. A Paramount picture featuring Betty Bronson.” (Beinecke) Ip B276 P43Z P44 Michael Kors “The Italian Riviera : a complete guide to Liguria, including Portofino, Cinque Terre, Portovenere, Genoa and Sanremo.” (Bass Library Travel Collection) DG975 L39 I83 2001 Proenza Schouler “Glamorama / Bret Easton Ellis.” (SML Linonia & Brothers) PS3555 L5937 G58 1999W Zac Posen “Goodbye to Berlin [sound recording] / Christopher Isherwood” (Bass Library, Audio Book Collection) PR6017.S5 A65 2004 Sabyasachi (check out the plasti-glasses on those models!) “The American Scholar” [backissue] (Beinecke) Za Zam346 v.39:no.3(1970:summer)-.42:no.3(1973:summer) And my personal fav (hint: Yale please buy me a dress now)… Rodarte “The melancholy android : on the psychology of sacred machines / Eric G. Wilson.” (SML) BD450 .W523X 2006 (LC) All images can be searched at: http://images.library.yale.edu/vrc/default.asp

Eigenfactors and impact factors

2008-10-13T18:10:34Z

Impact factors are published yearly by Thomson Reuters, a publishing and indexing company. They track 7500 journals, and for each of those journals record all articles published and their list of cited articles. A simple calculation is then done: the total citations to a journal in a given year are divided by the number of articles published in the journal over the previous two years. Impact factor have provided a quantitative measure to help with judging the importance of a journal, and librarians have used them in considering purchasing and/or cancelling journals. Since their creation in the 1960’s impact factors have become widely used and influential and are now often used in hiring, tenure and grant making decisions. Sole reliance on impact factors has raised concerns among scientists and librarians that impact factors are examined to the exclusion of other possible measures. There are numerous recognized problems with impact factors, here are a few: Impact factors work less well in some specialties than others, and a prime example is mathematics where typically researchers cite fewer articles and it takes more years for articles to be cited. This has caused mathematics journals to have significantly lower impact factors than other disciplines. Even Garfield observed "All citation studies should be adjusted to account for variables such as specialty, citation density, and half-life." The impact factor also works less well for smaller journals: journals that publish fewer than 50 articles a year show as much as 50% variability in impact factor: this can affect a small journal adversely if it is reviewed for cancellation in a year where it happens to have a much lower impact factor. Finally, research has shown that there is little or no relation between the impact of a journal and the individual articles published in it, but the work of an individual may be judged by the impact factor of journals she has published in. Thomson Reuters itself notes

You should not depend solely on citation data in your journal evaluations. Citation data are not meant to replace informed peer review. Careful attention should be paid to the many conditions that can influence citation rates such as language, journal history and format, publication schedule, and subject specialty.

While it is widely accepted that impact factors should only be one part of an evaluation of the worth of a journal, until recently there were no alternatives to impact factors. Two alternatives, Scimago and Eigenfactors have now emerged. Both use the Google page rank algorithm, and take into account networks of citations, or who cites whom. Eigenfactor, from the Bergstrom Lab at University of Washington, can be thought of as a measure of random walk through a library, where a researcher goes to the shelf and pulls a journal volume at random, and then looks at a specific article in the journal. She then follows one of the cited articles, moving to that journal, and starts the process again. The researcher will spend more time with journals that are highly cited. Eigenfactor algorithm gives greater weight to citations from those journals that are themselves highly cited, ignores self-citations, and uses 5 years of citations (instead of the two used for impact factors). The Eigenfactor provides results which are more comparable across disciplines and has less opportunity for editors and authors to game the system. Eigenfactors are freely accessible for academics and librarians to use. Eigenfactor.org provides a number of tools (all still in development): • Measure of “article influence” which takes into account the number of articles published in a journal • Motion charts showing changes in influence of individual journals over the last five years • Cost effectiveness of journals Perhaps most importantly, Eigenfactors represent another way of looking at journals, and can supplement the use of impact factors. To learn more about Eigenfactors, see http://www.eigenfactor.org/whyeigenfactor.htm A researcher from the Bergstrom Lab, Jevin West, will be at the Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall on November 3, 10:30am to discuss Eigenfactors. Jevin West is a Ph.D. student working to incorporate information theory and network theory into a broader understanding of biological evolution. He is currently involved in a network-based approach to bibliometric analysis, and a set of laboratory experiments testing the response of phage to variation in host susceptibility. Articles and reports about impact factors Joint Committee on Quantitative Assessment of Research. “Citation Statistics” http://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Report/CitationStatistics.pdf Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research“ BMJ 1997 314 (7079) 497, February 15. http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/314/7079/497 Garfield, E. "The history and meaning of the journal impact factor" JAMA, (293): 90-93, January 2006. http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/jifchicago2005.pdf

We're here! We're queer! And we're in Orbis!

2008-10-11T04:01:00Z

My sophomore year, Yale (and Yale’s libraries) did an amazing thing for me. I was awarded the Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prize for my collection, a six-degrees-of-separation library centered around W.H. Auden, E.M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood. Forster, Auden, and Isherwood were all gay. In their lifetimes they variously faced harassment, threats of imprisonment, and the need to delay or obfuscate their work because of anti-gay public sentiment. Today in Sterling Memorial Library we have E.M. Forster’s posthumously published gay-themed novel, Maurice, on the shelves, and obviously, it’s a good thing. We have novels by Alan Hollinghurst and Ali Smith, poetry from Sappho to Cavafy to Spencer Reece, and provocative philosophies of gender and sexuality by Judith Butler and Foucault. Self-Evident Truth: we read more interesting things in a world where authors are free to express their sexuality, and we’re free to read about it. We’re lucky that laws and customs have changed though protest and policy, and that your books are as free as your body. Let’s celebrate. E.M. Forster: Maurice Bass Library PR6011 O78 1972 5 W.H. Auden: Collected Poems Bass Library PR6001 U33 A17 1994 Christopher Isherwood: Berlin Stories Bass Library PR6017 S54 B4 1945 Larry Kramer Initiative: Queer zines, magazines, and newspapers collection LSF-Request for Use at Manuscripts and Archives MS 1847 ]]> The Line of Beauty Bass Library PR6058.O419 L56 2004B Ali Smith: Girl Meets Boy SML, Linonia and Brothers Room PR6069 M6205 G57 2007 Sappho: If not, winter : fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson Bass Library PA4408.E5 C37 2002 Cavafy: Collected poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard Bass Library PA5610 K2 A24 1992 Spencer Reece: The Clerk's Tale: Poems SML, Stacks, LC Classification PS3618.E4354 C58 2004 Judith Butler: Bodies That Matter : On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" Bass Library HQ1190 B88 1993 Foucault: History of Sexuality, translated by Robert Hurley Bass Library HQ12 F6813 1988

Working Toward a Better Orbis--We need your help

2008-10-06T21:00:00Z

The Library introduced its Orbis catalog interface in October 2002. Search on the web has improved steadily since 2002, but the Orbis search has changed relatively little. As a result, Orbis hasn't kept up with how our patrons our search. Consider Title searches, the most common type of search done in Orbis (about 40% are title searches). Title is also the default search run if the user doesn't change the search option when they enter Orbis. The most frequent number of results users get when they do a title search in Orbis is 0 hits, or nothing found. 0 hits may accurately reflect that the user wants a book which the Library doesn't have. 0 hits can also mean that there has been a mismatch between what the user wants to get, how they formulate the search and how Orbis interprets it. In either case the user gets no help from Orbis, neither indicating that the Library could get this book from another library, nor that the user perhaps made a simple error in spelling. When we looked closer at those 0 hits results what we most frequently saw was that the user really meant to search for a topic. For example the user typed in books about photography and there is no book to be found with that title. These users are showing very typical web search behavior, and that behavior is being defined by Google. The Google search box is very forgiving, and it doesn't require the user to think much about the search words they use and how those words will be interpreted by the system. Orbis is very different, and its search is much more rigid and unforgiving of things we've all come to take for granted. For example, Orbis will be defeated by simple misspellings, while Google can handle most misspellings. At the same time Orbis can do very precise searches for people who are really expert at finding books in a particular subject. The problem is most of us aren't experts at it, so Orbis can be difficult to use. The challenge for the Library is to keep advanced and precise functionality available in Orbis while also offering newer search capabilities more in line with today's technology. The Library has started an experiment with Yufind, an open-source library interface developed at Villanova by Andrew Nagy. It doesn't do everything we want, but it is a start. This is a very different project for the Library. Traditionally it has taken us more than a year to bring new interfaces to the web. Yufind was implemented in about three months. We've made it public while it is still changing. Over the next three months the Library will be working on Yufind and trying out new functionality. To do this well we need input from you. This is a request for you to try out Yufind on your next library search, and then tell us what you liked and didn't like about it. You get the pleasure of knowing you are helping to make the Library a better place for your colleagues, but in case you need more incentive, we'll also enter your name in a drawing for an iPod Touch (winner to be announced October 17). So look at Yufind today, and when you are done look for the survey option. Or if you've recently used Yufind you may also access the survey. We look forward to hearing from you.

Desperately Seeking Susan

2008-10-06T20:00:00Z

Adolescents have many heroes. You, dear reader, probably liked something cool, like vintage comics, or obscure Scottish indie bands, or the guy who undressed next to you in P.E. I, on the other hand, had a thing for Susan Sontag. More accurately, I wanted to be Susan Sontag. I wanted to be a Dark Lady of American Letters. I wanted to be caricatured in the NYRB. I wanted to write terse, deeply important meditations on obscure and forgotten European classics. Most importantly, I wanted a grey streak in my hair. I tried to make this grey streak happen using a variety of hair dyes, all of which manifested in an unsatisfying manner. About six years later, I still have a thing for Sontag. I have a first edition of Against Interpretation. But I also have a problem. Sontag attended the University of Chicago. In terms of our education, we have little in common. I have, for quite some time now, wanted to find a connection between Sontag and Yale. Thanks to the newly uploaded Yale Daily News archives, I now know that Sontag attended a Master’s Tea at Calhoun in 1980. Actually, the search term “Susan Sontag” brings up eight items in the database, which, although it consists of scanned images of papers, is searchable by keyword. Most pertinently for me, though, in 1980 the News ran a picture of Sontag at Yale. First of all, she is wearing a striped cardigan of the semi-schlumpy academic type. A cardigan! In high school, my sweater repertoire consisted solely of black turtle-necks, which is what Sontag seemed to wear in every photograph. Furthermore, the photo shows her grasping what appear to be chic large sunglasses. Obviously, these items will now be appearing in my wardrobe. More importantly, Sontag talks candidly in the article about observing the world as a writer: “When I know enough about something, and I think I have something to say, I sit down and write.” This is advice I (and the entire faux writerly population of Williamsburg, Brooklyn) intend to take. The YDN archives from the years 1967-1980 chronicle change and turmoil in America firsthand. They are the sort of primary source perfect for the stylish waif-students that don’t want to leave their soy lattes at Koffee Too to slave in the paper-based archives. But they’re also good for people like me, who like to read direct accounts of the history of ideas off hand and use them as a jumping off point for new work (the primary criterion being it doesn’t involve doing my assigned work). Or you know, if you want to become bra-burning, fire-breathing SDS-style Riot Grrl and do your mother proud (hi Mom!), you now have a manual. Sontag, whatever she thought about the patriarchy, would have probably been busy screaming instead about the misspelled titles of her books, Deathkit and I, Etcetera.—rendered amusingly as Deathkill and I, Electra. For anyone who complains about YDN copyediting today, they should see the 1980’s issues. Deathkill, sadly, is not a Tarantino flick featuring Sontag hacking up archrival Camille Paglia with a grandiosely stylised sword. Nor does the YDN archive feature any pictures of the Queen of Camp in a catsuit.

Welcome to Twofortyfive

2008-10-03T20:00:00Z

Libraries have always been about collections, and the Yale University Library is a world class collection full of wonderful material. But the real contribution hasn't been the collection itself--it's the connections made between people and books, images, letters and any of the hundreds of different types of materials housed in the Library: the transformation that can happen when a student or professor finds something that sparks a new idea or answers a question. The collection would be worthless without people to use them. Traditionally librarians have been dedicated to making their collections easy to discover, access and use. Patrons once had to physically come into the library and it was easy to get to know them and understand how they worked and what they needed. In the digital world, there is less opportunity for patron and librarian to talk to each other, because it is less common for them to interact in real time or in the same physical space. More and more collections are online, scholars are online, librarians are online too, but meaningful interactions are less frequent. Many of us in the Library spend a lot of time understanding the patron experience on the web. We sometimes interview users and ask them to look at new interfaces for us. In reality that gets us to very few patrons. We'd like to expand the communication a bit, and that is why we've started this blog. "We" are: Katie Bauer and Alice Peterson-Hart, Usability and Assessment staff. It's our job to try to help the library understand where our patrons are searching and what they need us to do differently. We also do a lot of work with the Digital Production and Integration Program, looking at interfaces of digitized material from the Library's collections. Scott Matheson is the Library Web Manager (or, as he describes himself, the web lackey). The blog isn't just for library staff. A really important part of this is a student who'll contribute her thoughts, Alexandra Marraccini. A self-described library junkie, she actually gets paid to write blog entries. Our first entry is from her, Desperately Seeking Susan and describes using newly digitized issues of the Yale Daily News.