notes & links

Improving the Catalog Interface with Endeca - Tito Sierra (NCSU) (link to podcast)

Additional Information available at http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/endeca/

This was the first talk where we heard the word Endeca, and by far the most comprehensive discussion of its capabilities. Tito Sierra said at the start that this talk would focus on the discovery portion of NCSU’s catalog. Their goals were to improve the user experience and make the MARC data work harder. They chose Endeca specifically because there were lots of commercial examples to look at, and they thought it would improve the users’ relevance rankings, improve their browsing experiences (both faceted browsing and true browsing), and give them faster searches.

This talk was especially useful coming so early in the conference because it provided a quick, visual introduction to a lot of the major concepts that would recur throughout the two days: faceted browsing, search “comforts,” the interactions between the presentation interface and the backend, etc.

Better relevance, better speed, a locally built and managed presentation interface and persistent parameter based encrypts (which allow persistent links to searches that can be embedded elsewhere) were described as postiive outcomes. Less positive were some things not supported by Endeca: personalization, folksonomies, etc.

This talk was also interesting to me in its specific discussion of the process of building and launching the product - Sierra argued for small teams and launching before the product is “done.” The team responsible for this project had only 7 people, with the charge to launch something when it was good and then improve it after launch. These two factors seem to be necessary to creating the kind of nimble and flexible organization that can stay ahead of changes to the information technology landscape, and they might suggest why NCSU so frequently is out in front of the curve with trying new things — it can’t be that they have better resources than everyone else. Last year at ILI one of the most worthwhile talks I saw was also from an NCSU librarian who argued for a similar approach - small teams, and trying new approaches (which sometimes don’t work - another thing that can be difficult in many libraries).

I’m taking a page from John’s book and keeping these notes here. Not so much because it is helpful for me today, but because in the future I may be able to be as efficient as John and Terry about getting these done at the conferences themselves.

I agree with Terry that it should be very interesting to see the reactions different people had to the same talks at Access. I’m only going to write about the talks I liked or talks I found useful (with perhaps one exception)

2nd session - Our Ontario: Yours to Recover (link to podcast)

Link to slides

Walter Lewis
Art Rhyno

This talk focused on one of the six services included in the Knowledge Ontario project, Our Ontario, which focuses on community content. They defined community content as all of that ephemeral content generated by community newspapers, newsletters, etc. that is captured by historical societies and community groups but is hard to access and sometimes disappears when people die, or move out of the community. So they are collecting a lot of stuff, in a lot of formats, with a lot of different kinds of metadata that needs to be attached.

They’re hoping that Lucene is the technology that will make the project happen underneath the presentation layer. This talk was notable in that it was the first time we heard the word “Lucene.” They described a variety of challenges: including stuff that’s really big, and stuff that’s really small, and bringing that stuff together in a coherent way. They also have to manage the metadata behind the scenes - and they have a lot of players and organizations participating. Sometimes they need to provide ways for those players to manage the data as well. So they have to consider their presentation layer, indexing layer and (for those institutions that need it) a content management layer.

What was interesting to me is that they’ve built in a lot of participatory features - like comments - so that users can add additional community information/knowledge to the objects and items included in this resource. They showed digital photographs that had been enhanced by user-provided content explaining where and when the photographs were taken, and identifying the people in the pictures. I have already found these examples to be a useful way to show non-library or non-technical audiences why these kinds of participatory features are useful and exciting for libraries and archives, even as they pose challenges of their own.