Library Web Chic

Since Midwinter I’ve been thinking about a bunch of different ideas of how we can improved the web services we provide to our users. Many of the things I’ve been thinking about involve making it easier for library users to repurpose the content that libraries provide access to. It isn’t easy for people to find books or articles or interest and add them to their blog, bookmark them using del.ic.io.us, or add them to a bibliographic management tool.

The only way in which I’ve seen this done is to add these types of features to the OpenURL resolver screen, which works but IMHO puts the tools too many clicks away. Instead our catalogs should have buttons like the ones that you see in Flickr. Library catalogs should have “Blog It”, “Bookmark It”, and “Cite It” buttons. We should be using MyLibrary customizations to allow users to set preferences and user information for these external services that the users wants to push library information to.

Taking this one step further. Books and information in the catalog are just the tip of the iceberg of information that libraries provide access to. These same buttons should be in all the database search results screens. It may be that a federated search tool is the best way to make this happen because we can customize how search results appear more in federate search tools then in individual databases.
I’ve also been thinking about how difficult it is for librarians themselves to repurpose library content. It isn’t necessarily seamless and easy for librarians to incorporate content from the catalog into the library web site At my institution this problem might be solve by using the XML server module for Innovatives ILS. One thing that I’d really like to do is allow the librarians to add links to books and other library resources in their web pages. Right now this isn’t easy. I’ve been thinking about adding a button to the WYSIWYG tool we are going to have in our CMS that would allow them to search the catalog and mark things to add to the page. Then it would just insert properly formed hyperlinks. I need to do some investigations on how to use javascript to manipulate XML but I think its possible. In my dream world librarians would be able to do this with database search results as well.

Even better would be integrating the same type of functionality into course management systems so that professors could easily link to library content that they wanted their students to access. While links can be created now it can be a cumbersome process.

An offshoot of this is allowing library users to be able to repurpose content and have other people seeing that content be able to access it via their library. It is the perpetual question of appropriate copy. COinS, and tools like Libx are good steps forward to solving this problem.

However, in an ideal world, when I blogged a book from my catalog the link that was generated would direct the user not to the place where I found the book but the place where they could get the book. So if I was building a tool now, all the links for books would refer to OpenWorldcat which would help the user reading the blog post locate where they could get the book. How one solves this question for articles is a much squirrelier question in my mind. But here’s how I think it might be done. When a link to an article is made it goes to a service that OCLC would provide which keeps track of OpenURL resolvers. Based on the zip code that the user enters results for where the article might be accessed are returned. It isn’t perfect because my zip code would return results for places like UH Clear Lake that I don’t have access to. However, it would get the user a lot closer to getting the item. All of these types of services enhance the user’s experience by making library content more useful to users, and easier to find.