Collection Respacing

We are currently undertaking a weeding project – chucking out old multiple copies of textbooks – as part of a broader project to reduce the size of our main collection, and so I’ve been looking into the problem of collection respacing. We have around 900.000 volumes in our main collection stacks, so respacing is going to require a significant effort.

Now, while you may think this is about as interesting as a Senate committee hearing into the price of beets, respacing turns out to be an interesting logistical problem (or nightmare) and a surprisingly difficult problem, due to the number of variables: the height and thickness of individual volumes; the spacing between shelves; … actually not that many, now that I think on it. But still interesting. Trust me.

We can start with a few known metrics: we have standard 26 inch / 900 mm shelf widths, adjustable, with typically seven shelves per bay. There don’t seem to be any “rules” about shelf heights, so we can define a standard of 12 inch centres between shelves, which for seven shelves per bay makes the top shelf 74 inches / 190cm high. And we can add a constraint here: while it is possible to go higher, there are solid health and safety reasons not to, so we can define a maximum height of 74 inches.

There are some “rules of thumb” that can help: based on a standard shelf width of 36 inches, there are tables showing the average number of volumes per shelf. This varies depending on whether you are looking at journals or books, and subject areas – fiction tends to be thinner than, say, engineering, so you can pack more into fiction shelves. The tables assume you want spacing to allow for expansion of the collection over time, so assume 33% free space. In our case, this is too much: we are working on a “steady state” model, where we expect to send to the store, or weed, an equivalent number of books to the number we add each year. [When you have zero chance of getting a new building, or extension, the steady state has to be.] This means we should only require a minimal amount of free space on each shelf, say 10%, to allow for ebb and flow of material. Based on that, we can expect between 25 and 30 volumes per shelf. Average. Depending on the subject area.

The height of books adds another dimension (literally) to the problem. [Thompson] helpfully suggests a shelf spacing of 12 inches will accommodate 90% of a collection – in our case meaning that 90,000 volumes won’t fit with that spacing, which is not very encouraging. In some areas, e.g. 823, the average height is much less, so we could in theory have more shelves per bay (I have seen eight); in other areas, e.g. Art, we have many volumes over that 11 inch height, so we’ll likely have less than seven shelves per bay – perhaps only five. In many cases, journal volumes are taller than 11 inches, so areas with high journal numbers will have fewer shelves per bay.

All these numbers are of course only useful in making broad estimates. If we know how many volumes there are in a given range of call numbers, then we can estimate how many shelves we’ll need for that range. But translating that into bays will require some estimate of average height, or percentage of shelves requiring more than a 12 inch spacing.

So the next step will be to gather some statistics through sampling of heights/spacings.

References at http://del.icio.us/spotrick/collection+management

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Journals Store project

Hard at work, originally uploaded by Spotrick.

It was a busy week last week — lots happening, what with xmas events and so on. Among other things, our Library started a project shifting bound volumes of journals to our store — those which are also available on line. (We purchased Elsevier back-sets through Science Direct.)

So our team (mostly from Lending Services) has been hard at work removing volumes from the shelves, processing them (changing their location in the Catalogue and labeling them), and crating them up for sending to the store.

In four and a half days, they’ve shifted over 7,000 volumes, which is pretty good going. (On the other hand, that represents only 0.35% of our collection!)

I’ve been trying to capture all this on “film”, but have not yet found the definitive image. I’ll try again next week.

360 Search — it’s not bad!

Just back from a demo of “360 Search”, a Federated Search product from Serials Solutions. Now while I have previously said that Federated Search is a load of dingos kidneys, and will never work, I have to say I was quite impressed with this offering. It still suffers from the same problem that all FS products share, namely the dependence on external providers’ response times affecting the local response. But the demo searched over 20 databases simultaneously and brought back a consolidated 450+ result set in around 60 seconds, so that’s not bad performance, considering.

One very nice feature here is the inclusion of results clustering (using software from Vivisimo), which is great, and makes narrowing of the result set easy.

We were looking at it for a very specific and narrow purpose, but … despite my previous experience and subsequent loathing of FS … I think this is good enough to put in front of students.

Time will tell.

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A service presence on MyFace?

Interesting article in the Grauniad on a JISC study into Universties having a presence in social networks, “Students tell universities: Get out of MySpace!” [http://education.guardian.co.uk/students/news/story/0,,2205512,00.html]

…E-learning gurus want to exploit their students’ passion for the new generation of interactive online communication tools – collectively known as web 2.0 – to deliver academic content. Not content with podcasting mini-lectures to students’ mobile phones and i-Pods, they are hijacking the internet telephone system, Skype, and invading FaceBook.

Can’t help noticing the language here: exploit, not content with, hijacking, invading.

But a research exercise carried out by the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc), called the Learner Experience Project, has just revealed, amazingly, that students want to be left alone. Their message to the trendy academics is: “Get out of MySpace!”

Humph. Call it journalistic license, or just bad journalism, because none of this is evidenced in the rest of the article.

Online spaces are blurring, as universities that podcast and text their students have shown. The Jisc project manager, Lawrie Phipps, explains how the battle lines are being drawn: “Students really do want to keep their lives separate. They don’t want to be always available to their lecturers or bombarded with academic information.”

Based on qualitative research – one-to-one interviews with students conducted over two years – Jisc has built up a picture of how students are using IT to manage their social lives. Most are confident and competent IT users, but they are too often unaware of how they could apply their skills to enhance their studies.

Something that amused me was this:

Phipps recalls interviewing a first-year female arts undergraduate who professed absolute ignorance of e-learning or web applications. “She was updating her blog at an internet café and then started integrating photos from her Flickr site on to the blog. At the end of it she said, ‘That’s not technology. That’s what I do.’ “

This suggests to me that (as always) the answer you get depends on the question you put. Did they ask “what do you know about e-learning applications?” — if so its not hard to imagine the blank stares they got.

Phipps claims that once universities start using Facebook to talk to students it will be the thin end of the wedge. Just as the Blackberry was once hailed as the great liberator, enabling executives to work more flexible hours, the internet messaging mobile phone has become an instrument of oppression whose owners are constantly at their boss’s beck and call.

I’m guessing the Blackberry has an off-switch. Or you can just leave it in your briefcase, guys.

And just like the Blackberry there are positives and negatives. “Students appear to want their cake and eat it,” says Phipps. “They appear to want to keep their online persona private but when you ask them whether they’d like instant communication with tutors or feedback on essays (via Skype or Facebook) the answer is always yes.”

Sigh. Where to start? For one, communication on MyFace is not instantaneous, anymore than email or sms are. Its asynchronous, which is what makes it compellingly powerful. Second, if I were a lecturer, the last thing I’d want (or allow) is students phoning me any time they felt the need. Ditto IM. Face-to-face requires an appointment, or at best limited set hours. But I’m always happy to respond to an email or Facebook message — at a time of my choosing.

I believe that if we ask the right questions, then the answer will overwhelmingly be in favour of some kind of University presence in Facebook. The first important thing about Facebook in this context is that anything we offer — from a contact page to sophisticated apps — is going to be OPTIONAL. The student must choose to opt in to your app, and will be able to opt out again if you bore or irritate them.

I’ve done my own survey — asked a couple of students — if they’d like a library app that sent them a notification when they had overdue books, and the response was a immediate yes. Well, they might change their mind once they realise that all their friends will know they have books overdue, but … that will be their choice.

The point is, there will be no hijacking or force-feeding of unwanted information (unless Unis start advertising) because Facebook simply don’t work that way.

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Library catalogue enhancements revisited

I’ve revisited the code I developed last year, which adds useful links to our library catalogue records. It was always somewhat experimental (perpetual beta) so the revisit is not surprising: as I learn more and understand more about what people want, I’ll no doubt revisit again.

This time round — prompted by my Facebook investigations — I’ve added a few “share this page” links, to del.icio.us, Digg and Facebook.I’ve also revamped the very ugly code that provided a bookmark-able link for an item, turning it into an “Add to Favorites” button. This uses a nifty bit of Javascript found on the web, which works both in IE7 and Firefox 2.0-based browsers.

We still have the previous enhancements — Amazon covers, links to Google etc. Although the code has undergone a major makeover, basically a tidy-up to make it public-ready.

You can see an example catalogue record here:
http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=642088

And the code is here:
http://library.adelaide.edu.au/local/scripts/andjagetta.pl

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DIY Mozilla/Firefox/Flock search plugin

I just spent a jolly hour creating a Firefox search plugin for our library catalogue. (Actually for Flock, which I’m now using — and lovin’ — for its integration with services like Flickr and Facebook. But I digress.)

Creating the search plugin was easy in most respects. There was plenty of documentation on the plugin format on Google. Unfortunately, all of it seemed to be out of date for Firefox 2.0. But the easy solution to that is to open the searchplugins folder in Firefox (or Flock) and copy one of the files there. Google seems a good one to use.Then edit the details and — viola — you have a search plugin.

Except: one of the requirements is an image file for the toolbar, and it seems that this image needs to be embedded in the xml file and Base64 encoded. I have an icon — the favicon used in our web site, but needed to convert that to Base64.

Now, there is at least one tool available on the web for converting files to Base64, but if you want to do it yourself, and can run perl, here’s a trivial bit of code that will do the conversion for you:

$ perl -we ‘use MIME::Base64; local $/; open ICO, “<favicon.ico” or die “$!\n”; $x=<ICO>; close ICO; print MIME::Base64::encode($x);’ > icon.txt

Then you can simply replace the Google icon Base64 code with the content of icon.txt, and you’re done. (Actually, you may have to remove all the line breaks.)

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