The Communicat

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The Communicat

• contribute to the collective collection, comrade

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What is a catalog?

• An inventory of resources accumulated over time
  largely dictated by
• Collection development policies
• Budget
• Preferences and biases of subject specialists (or
  lack thereof)
• No real relationship to the outside world
• No real way for the community to be directly
  involved

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More than just inventory

• Before drinking the Kool-Aid one must accept that
  public interface doesnt have to be 11 with
  inventory
• Doesnt have to be included in ILS
• Doesnt have to be included by default
• Theoretically doesnt have to be included
  publicly at all

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Now that Ive backed away from that
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Lets rewind one year

• Desire to capture individuals interests and
  associations between objects
• Scope search context through lens created by
  interest/community
• Snapshots of scholarly content aggregated into
  clusters or groups (by project, class, etc.)

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First try Unalog

• Social bookmarking service created by Dan Chudnov
• http//unalog.com/
• Built-in support for groups
• Kicked around extending Unalog to support MODS
• Installed local development instance gTunalog
• A little more simplistic than we could use

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So on with the vision thing
Catalog records
Webpages
Citations
Communicat
Interlibrary Loans
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citation
citation
User
Reserve items
citation
annotation
User
Group Superconductor Research Article
User
Group Psychology 231
User
citation
Communicat
annotation
citation
ILL
bookmark
bookmark
bookmark
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Emory Universitys Communicat
Joint research group
Georgia Techs Communicat
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So what we thought

• Dont worry about the end result right away
• Allow users to gather resources and aggregate
  them however they want
• It doesnt matter where things come from
• We can use things we can identify (OpenURLs,
  MARC, DC, etc.)
• Treat everything else like a bookmark

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How to approach?

• Submission needed to be in workflow users
• We would also need to know a little about what
  the user was looking at/where they were
• Link resolver would tell us a lot of that

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Birth of the Ümlaut

• Didnt think SFX would meet needs out of the
  box
• Needed to come up with different handlers based
  on what something is
• Grab data from a variety of sources
• Give user a variety of places to store
  citations del.icio.us, Connotea, CiteULike,
  EndNote, etc.

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Building a better link resolver

• Broke ground mid-March last year with proof of
  concept
• Ruby on Rails application
• By April we knew we had something to work with
• Finished mid-summer, launched before Fall
  semester (with no personalization/Communicat
  functionality)

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What it does

• Queries Crossref/Pubmed and grabs any metadata it
  can find
• Queries SFX, Voyager catalog and consortial
  catalog (via xisbn, if necessary)
• Queries Amazon, Google and Yahoo
• Presents results to user

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Then behind their back

• Queries Connotea, CiteULike, Yahoos MyWeb and
  Unalog
• Harvests metadata from any known OAI-PMH server
• Makes associations between their citation and
  other things (via catalog, Amazon, other
  resolved citations, Citeseer references, etc.)

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Todos

• Personalization!
• Was held up for a few reasons
• Bugs needed ironing out at first
• Fit into a larger framework
• Seemed a bit overwhelming all at once
• Redesign of backend in process, should be
  finished by end of month

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Stage 2 Fancy Pants

• AJAX Layer over WebVoyage
• Aggregation of several components (improved
  search result display, faceting, spellcheck,
  etc.)
• Replacement of Voyagers record save feature
• Saved things from OPAC and Ümlaut should go to
  the same place
• Track how people use the OPAC what do they
  click on? What resources do they look at?

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Status

• Mostly built (although new components will
  continue to be developed)
• Librarians looking at current functionality
• Launch Spring Break?

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Next step Emperors clothes

• Native interface for Fancy Pants components
• Uses Solr/Lucene/Ferret for searching, calls back
  to Voyager for holdings and patron empowerment
• When logged in, scopes relevance to user context
• Expect development to really take off Fall 07

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Meanwhile, in the classroom

• LibraryCube web services bundle of library
  things to enable communication to non-library
  applications
• Primary use case would be courseware
  specifically Sakai
• Two way communication, LibraryCube aggregates
  library services for classroom purposes and
  classroom results for library purposes
• Builds Communicat groups according to needs, can
  return results based on group dynamics

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The Research Trail

• Track users paths through information landscape
  and annotations surrounding them to the eventual
  scholarly output
• Can be used for classroom, professional writing,
  graduate thesis/dissertation, etc.
• A sort of überbibliography

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Powered by GaTher

• The engine that saves all of these items and
  creates associations between them
• Breaking ground now for Fancy Pants
• DCMI/RDF based model for storing items can point
  back to original (also would store original
  format MARC, OpenURL, etc.)
• Initial interface would look very social
  bookmarker-y

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Many faces of GaTher

• Citation manager
• Reserves system
• Subject/Research Guides
• Wishlist
• Recommender service
• Personal library
• Group library
• Project space
• Student portfolio

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Tying it all together

• Lots of seemingly disparate services that have
  nothing to do with each other
• To the whiteboard!

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Its all about how you want to look at the blob
in the middle

• The data behaves differently based on the context
  in which it is viewed
• But its all basically the same data
• Users dont really care they just want it to
  work
• Focus on the ingester perspective first

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Considerations

• Another black box does no good
• This doesnt have to supply the interface,
  necessarily, just data
• In fact, its ok if all it does is aggregate
  citation managers and social bookmarks
• Cant force users away from what they want to use
• LMS integration is key, however captive audience

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Redefining catalog

• An aggregation of resources that is useful to a
  community
• Includes resources and relationships that are
  tailored to the individual
• Used things are more relevant/profile influences
  results
• Inventory still just as important, but serves a
  different purpose

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Thanks!

• Any questions?
• ross.singer_at_library.gatech.edu