NEASIST Embedded library meeting - Hennig
I am at the "Embedded library" meeting of the New England Chapter of ASIST&T. The speaker right now is Nicole Hennig, MIT Library webmistress and general tecchie cool woman (and our alum). She spearheaded an effort to find out how MIT students look for information (they used "keep a photo-journal" methods). Turns out (surprise) that almost all of them use primarily Google and ts various sub-applications (such as Scholar), plus Wikipedia, and a few favourite resources. They virtually ignore the library and its wide array of resources.
She cited a story of one student who spent hours and days trying to find one book, at academic libraries all over the world - when, of course, he could have just used Worldcat. Students felt that the OPAC interface, and other library information-seeking library services, were far too complex and cluttered. The general upshot of their study was that they needed to a) integrate search and discovery, and b) put themselves where the users are. To do a) they need to aggregate metadata, which is difficult for content they don't own but have licence to (they can use MetaLib X-server). They hope to present one search box and Endeca-style faceted navigation. To do b) they can use browser extensions. Nicole cites Karen Holtzblatt's Conetxtaul Design, in which she points out that successful products extend the work practice. They use LibX (Firefox toolbar extension), and want to develop a utility for sending a search from an OPAC record to services like amazon, Worldcat, and so on. They also provide RSS feeds, pod and vlod casts. They use FeedDigest to put blog entry snippets onto Web pages with a little bit of JavaScript. They will be part of iTunes U, they might use LibraryThing for their new book "browsery".