American Libraries

George M. Eberhart: What other types of search technologies will your other companies be implementing over the next two years, or what are you going to try to aim for? Stephen, you have a pretty innovative company, what types of things are you planning for search capabilities?

Stephen Rhind-Tutt: As a smaller company a lot of the best ideas, we think, unfortunately come from outside the library industry: Google, Yahoo—a lot of these guys have taught us a great deal about making interfaces simple and straightforward. There are, however, I feel, a number of areas where we can add real value, one in particular is video. Video is extremely cumbersome to search. And although Google has—as always—made some inroads, the proportion of video they’ve actually put up is relatively small, YouTube aside. And the content they put up is largely in the public domain or illegal. So we think there’s a great opportunity to actually create an academic variant, much in the same way as when you go into bookshop, there’s a public domain $10 version of classic a Charles Dickens book, and then there’s an Oxford University Press $45 scholarly edition. So we think there’s a similar opportunity in video to create an academically-oriented¬—what we call a “critical video edition.”

George M. Eberhart: You talked to me yesterday a little bit about folksonomies. Can you explain—is that going to work? Is that going to work in supplement to the structured thesauri?

Jim Draper: We have today at Gale very many customers who have said, “Please institute some kind of folksonomy in your products.” And I agree with you very much that there’s no critical mass yet to make this really work well, but we still need to develop the tool and see how it works. But I’m convinced that that folksonomy needs to live in harmony and in parallel as a compliment to the main taxonomy. And then we can use that to help create real nice finding aids. But again, the critical mass is the vital piece of this.

Michael Gorrell: As much as we might think about our services, the vast majority of the users of ours don’t use our services because the love them, they use them because they have to. And so the thought of college students tagging articles inside EBSCO host, or ProQuest, or some of the other products, I just don’t see them paying much attention.

George M. Eberhart: What about faculty? Are they any better?

Christopher Warnock: There’s a comment I’d like to tag on to his and that is that when the telephone switchboards first came out, they quickly learned that teenage boys could not be telephone operators because they were very happy to incorrectly make the connection and to randomly disconnect people or listen in. And when we were talking with libraries about introducing folksonomies in ebrary, I don’t recall who pointed it out, but we had a number of people point out that it’s a competitive environment. And that for a college student in a competitive environment, tagging something for benefit— it might be to their benefit for them to mistag or to try and hide information, like the student who comes in, takes the book off the library and misshelves it so that they have exclusive access to it.

George M. Eberhart: Or rips out the pages, like law students do. For example, Wikipedia is certainly user-supplied. I know you’re doing some blogging add-ons. Is anybody else doing anything like that, in terms of blogging? Is ProQuest doing anything?

Linda Goldberg: We are looking at tagging as one of the ways to allow users to supply content and much has been mentioned. There’s a question about, “Is there a sacrifice to integrity to just open it up or is there a way we can make an appropriate community of people able to supply tagging?” Those who do, have some vested interest.

Kevin Ohe: This is a situation where we feel we have a product that fits the technology in that sense. And so, we’ve got a product, Pop Culture Universe, which is basically a reference book database. It’s book based, so we can tell librarians, tell our students, “Look, this is a safe place for you to go. You can have a research experience where you can get information that ‘counts.’ You can use this for your paper; it’s a safe haven.” But it is book based and we instituted it for a couple reasons: One, because we feel that we can get a community around pop culture because that’s kind of the lingua franka of our users; and two, it enables us to keep current in a way that books don’t.

George M. Eberhart: Anthony at Capital IQ, which is a contact management kind of database, you have something called Six Degrees of Separation Tools. Can you explain what that is and how that might be applicable to other databases?

Anthony Paredes: Sure. The platform was started by investment bankers who were looking to facilitate deals and use their contacts that they might have had in a previous life. And so within Capital IQ we developed in house the ability to leverage your own relationships, leverage your own contacts. You can do it a couple different ways. You can say, “I would like to see everybody which I have a relationship at IBM.” And it will go through, it will layer out proprietary notes which you put into the platform, and then map out those relationships for you. And I think in this economy where you’re trying to actually narrow down—and this goes back to the search engine, smart tagging individuals—we’re capturing this information from a variety of sources and our researchers are actually going through and painstakingly reading the old-fashioned way, not just taking in data feeds of information and trying to identify individuals. So we have a pretty smart tool within the platform that allows you to do that.

George M. Eberhart: We have a question over here.

Librarian: Thank you. Libraries are not very good at marketing and you have a very good product. I go out and talk a lot of times on behalf of my library to a lot of different people in the community, most of them not aware that we have what we have. The databases appear to be a secret in many communities. I was wondering what you were thinking of doing to help the library that never really thought of themselves as a marketing agent to help them in some way in doing this.

Jim Draper: It's heartbreaking when you make a product and no one uses it, so we're obsessed these days with usage. One of the things we’re doing at Gale is something called AccessMyLibrary—aml.com or accessmylibrary.com. We created this service about two and a half, three years ago by putting a lot of our content out on the web in a shadow site where we spidered or crawled by a search engine. So there's tens of millions of Gale articles out on the open web. You can discover these in Google results, so this way it's automatic marketing. Now, this works naturally best for public libraries who have patrons with library cards. When you find that article out on the web, you can't see the whole thing; you need to link into your library. There's an authentication process and it works pretty well. I think we can do better here. But that concept has been very important for Gale in making our public library products, especially, much more used. The trick here is to get all of our content out on the open web in this same format so it can be found there but not read in its entirety. Because guess what? If we did that, we'd be out of business tomorrow. So we need to make sure it's read at your library.

Christopher Warnock: We just completed a global student survey on e-book usage and there were a couple of very interesting things that came out of that. When the students were asked in the survey, “How did they hear about e-books?” the number one way that they heard about e-books was from the librarian. The number two way that they heard about e-books was from the OPAC. And the third way was from the library web site. But then, many of the libraries that were participating in these discussions threw out the notion that because they've gone to great lengths to make their OPAC look like the website, that a lot of students may not be correctly distinguishing between the Web site and the online catalog.