October 23, 2006
IL06, Day 1 Confgrunt
Here's my raw notes from day one of the internet librarian conference. Trish has a whole blog with her notes.
Apparently there are about 1415 people participating in the conference (1250 paid attendees for the sessions), 48 states and the District of Columbia are represented (not sure why there were no people from Deleware or Mississippi), and from 9 other countries. There are 130 speakers and moderators presenting.
Keynote: J.A. Jance was the keynote speaker. Apparently not only does she blog but the character in her book Edge of Evil blogs as well. It was a funny and interesting (if completely unrelated to the conference) talk, and she sang the Janice Ian song "At 17" and did The Last Blues Song (complete with the "Woh-woh-woh-woh-woh-woh-woh-woh") as an encore!
Session One: Increasing the Use of Online Products (C101)
with Peter Simon, Lesley Williams, Lare Mischo and Jeff Wisniewski
i was pleasantly surprised on how many points carried over from academic libraries to our corporate library needs... lots of things to think about in restructuring our online services page
- Best Practices — Five Proven Ways to Increase Use of Paid Online Databases
- organizae the online database page -- language patrons understand and good descriptions of each ("click here to search news articles from 19XX to 2006, rather than name-of-vendor-providing-db)
- test the links!
- Lesley Williams article from library Jounral, Making “E” Visible
- Library Terms That Users Understand by John Kupersmith
- provide "multiple finding points" for online services
- title index to complete magazine and journal collection (print and online)
- put online resources into the catalog
- Portland, ME - good descriptions of their online services
- Get other sites to link to us -- right to the online services
- inspire.net IN state library page, promotes statewide db access
- iconn.org marketing survey results
- advertise the ones with the most general appeal, and also do targeted marketing
- "We have to stop doing marketing as if we were running for student council president!"
- people can use Reference USA to make mailing lists
- Thompson Gale, accessmylibrary.com, find out local libraries that subscribe
- Wall Street Journal article on Big Help for Small Business at the Library
- become the "bottled water" -- advertising created that huge market
Lesley Williams:
Jeff Wisniewski:
- no better way to increase use of online services than federated searching
- metric - click throughs to full records/full text
- webfeat
- PowerUsers (and professors) appreciate the A-Z database lists
- add a message to the page you get if there are no search results with tips (did you mean to search for articles?)
- make it obvious, easy and ubiquitous
Session Two: 30 Search Tips in 45 Minues (A102)
Mary Ellen Bates
She's great and I learned a lot of great search tips! I'll go back through and add the links when I have more time
- Use search engines' "Answers"
- Squidoo
- Use Rollyo.com, Yahoo Search Builder or Gigablast's Custom Topic Search to build customized search engine
- Put that customized search engine on users' home page (and also links to online catalog and other resources)
- Google's synonym-finder
- Google Co-op
- Google Trend Search
- Google Notebook
- Google's News Archive
- Yahoo's Search Subscriptions
- Yahoo's Mindset Feature
- Yahoo's Site Explorer
- Exalead
- Gigablast.com
- MSN's cool synonym-suggestion tool
- MSN's misspelling-suggestion engine
- Zibb.com
- Kosmix.com
- pathfinders and subject guides
- Tara Calishain's Kebberfegg
- Scandoo.com
- NationMaster.com
- AccessMyLibrar.com
- Eurekster's Swicki
- TaxonomyWarehouse.com
- Mining podcast content, chunking of search results
- Qwika.com to search wikis
- Furl.net
- Use LibraryThing to find related books ("People who own this book also own")
- Data visualization on Factiva
Session Three: New Search Strategies (A103)
Greg Notess
Search Engine Showdown
Feature Chart
- Search Transfer
- between search engines (try his bookmarklets), between databases on a site
- Refine and Explore Terms (expand/narrow, related terms, directory terms)
- Ask.com, Exalead, Clusty, NortherLight.com
- Search as You Type
- Google Suggest, All the Web (Yahoo)
- Definitions
- answers.com, wikipedia, Yahoo! Reference, Google define:
- Search Societies
- Del.ici.us, Furl, Connotea (scientific)
- Field Searching
- site: gov, site:harvard.edu, inurl:library
- Expanded Search
- Rollyo, Live Macros (under more, Find Macros)
- Filetype Searches
- filetype:pdf (Google, Live, Exalead), orignurlextension:pdf (yahoo)
- tips for pdf searches: leave off the first letter, add spaces between letters
- Exalead Analysis -- shows breakdown of results by file type -- that could actually come in handy at work!!
- Link searching
- link:http://xyz
- Google only shows a fraction, Yahoo and Live are much more detailed
- Live: linkfromdomain:loc.gov site:hr (where do they link to? Library of Congress -> Coatia)
- Phrase Searching, proxminity at Exalead
- Cache to the Past (most include the date of the crawl - exp Yahoo)
- between search engines (try his bookmarklets), between databases on a site
Session Four: Cool Tools and Mashups
Darlene Fichter and Frank Cervone
From where I was sitting I couldn't see the bottom of their slides with the URLs, so here's the titles from the tops of each, and I'll have to go look them all up later
Font Tester, Meta Tag Expert, URL Investigator, Link Popularity Check, eXactMapper Lite, Google Sitemap Builder, Wink, Powerbullet Presenter, PHP Editor, PH Expert & Debugger
aws.amazon.com, google.com/apis/maps, api.search.google
suprglu.com, communitywalk.com, Frappr, yourmap.com, mapbuilder.net, google.mapbuilder.com (sucks in data from a spreadsheet and maps it)
pull in covers and reviews from Amazon
book carousel, virtual carousel
developer.yahoo.com/yui
Flickr Fun - captioner, colr pickr, Flickr toys
gliffy.com
community toolbar from Conduit, conduit.com
Firefox extension: duplicate tab, tab x, tails export (microformats), goodle notebook, Measure It, IE Tab, Linkification, Zotero
retrievr, adblock, web developer toolbar, accessibility toolbar, html tidy
Google Code Search
northstar.net community in a box
Digref listserv
lifehacker.com
programmable web
Session Five: Library Redesign: Making the Data Work Harder
Steve McCann (this was supposed to alo be Amanda Hollister, who unfortunately called in sick)
I shouldn't have gone to this one... oh well, you can't win them all
Session Six: Keeping One Click Ahead
Gary Price and Steven M. Cohen
One Click Ahead -- Gary Price's presentation
Information Overload is a Myth! -- Steven M. Cohen's presentation