The Communicat

1
The Communicat

• contribute to the collective collection, comrade

2
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

3
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

4
Enter the Communicat

• 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.)

5
So on with the vision thing
Catalog records
Webpages
Citations
GaTher
Interlibrary Loans
6
citation
citation
User
Reserve items
citation
annotation
User
Group Superconductor Research Article
User
Group Psychology 231
User
citation
GaTher
annotation
citation
ILL
bookmark
bookmark
bookmark
7
Emory Universitys GaTher
Joint research group
Georgia Techs GaTher
8
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

9
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

10
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

11
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.

12
Powered by GaTher

• The engine that saves all of these items and
  creates associations between them
• Uses the Daisy CMS behind the scenes
• Items have multiple parts
• Can include MARC, XML, RSS TOC Feeds,
  descriptions
• Ability to create relationships between items
• Initial interfaces would be a social bookmarker
  and library neighborhood search

13
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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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

15
Defining the universe

• All items assigned to a realm
• Core juried resources determined to be
  important universally to research OPAC, IR,
  Finding Aids, etc.
• Community Items added by Georgia Tech groups
  reserves, articles, bookmarks, etc.
• World Items added by people outside of Georgia
  Tech

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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
• Courseware integration is key, however captive
  audience

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Why a CMS?

• Were really looking for a publishing system more
  than a repository
• Librarians, faculty, anybody can take our
  resources and describe, annotate and present them
  any way they wish
• The ability to quickly edit content around a
  resource will make it easily adaptable to any
  environmental changes

18
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

19
Thanks!

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