@library.edu the newsletter of the Swarthmore College Library
New
tripod
Spring 2012 Vol. 14, no. 2
expands search results
by Annette Newman
Tripod does more now.
Search for articles, books, and more at the same time. New options for better results.
Library users now have a new place to start their searches. From a single point, Tripod searches for individual journal articles as well as the tri-college libraries’ collection of books, journal titles, multimedia materials, databases and more. There is no need to decide between searching for books or journal articles first - Tripod now does a simultaneous search of both the regular catalog and many of the article databases. Using the list of facets to reduce choices to specific criteria can produce more precise search results. Similar items are now suggested, like the “Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Bought� feature on Amazon. Related items are also listed. The new Tripod is a discovery layer, a framework that allows for multiple collections or indexes of content to be searched simultaneously in the same interface. This discovery layer sits on top of the content resources and provides a unified, cohesive interface to search across book and journal article resources. The goal is to reduce the number of tools that researchers must use to gain an understanding of the breadth of content held by the tri-colleges. Designed for undergraduate students, the novice researchers, this discovery layer provides an overview of available content for those not expert in the field they are researching. It should also improve use of underutilized items by doing a better job of helping patrons find what they are specifically looking for and revealing related resources they may not have known about. The multi-channel approach of the new Tripod presents available resources in a clear format. After entering the initial search terms, users see two lists: Books and More, and Articles. The filters, or facets, listed to the right are the way to narrow the list of results. For example, researchers can ask for only resources that are available online, for certain publication dates, for type of media like DVDs or streaming video, and for authors and other categories. This ability to see facets of search results returns more precise and meaningful information to the student. Tripod Classic, the old Tripod, is still easily accessible; the researcher can reach this familiar interface with one click. Everything that was there before is still available. Faculty and student researchers can still access the individual databases to search for journal articles. All of the familiar tools, such as Find-It, are available from both the classic and new version. The updated Tripod is simply a new place to start and refine your search, a better way to find, access, and organize all the great resources the library has accumulated and developed over the years.
Dirty data can cause trouble in the new Tripod by Barbara Weir One of the advantages of a catalog discovery layer such as the new Tripod is the ability to narrow search results using filters or “facets,” which include the characteristics describing a resource such as the format, subject headings, publication date, etc. However, the effectiveness of faceted browsing relies on descriptive data that is clean and consistent. “Dirty data,” such as typos, inconsistent author headings, or incorrect format coding, previously virtually unnoticed in Tripod Classic, become glaringly obvious when displayed in a filter. These mistakes, while seemingly minor, can affect the retrieval of catalog records. Besides human error, why are these inconsistencies in the catalog? One reason is that cataloging practices change over time. Until recently the Library of Congress did not consistently add an author’s death date to the author heading. Therefore, an author’s name could appear twice: as Smith, Robert, 1925- and as Smith, Robert, 1925-2011. Narrowing a search result to just one or the other will cause a patron to lose some of the author’s works. Another change was to the 3-letter coding of language of multi-lingual works. These are currently coded so each of the languages can be parsed and displayed. However, older cataloging practice was to concatenate all of the codes. As a result, a language code for a title in English, French, and German could have displayed as “engfreger.” In fact, one library implementing a catalog discovery layer found over ten thousand records with bad language codes displaying as a top result in their language filter. The “date of publication” filter was particularly complicated to construct because the date can be found in a number of places in a bibliographic record and because more than one date can be associated with an item. For example, a piece of music could have been performed in one year, but published in another. Digitized items may include a date of publication of the original print as well as a date when the item was digitized. If a date is unknown, it may have been coded in different ways depending on the cataloging practice at the time. The largest source of inconsistencies, however, comes from vendor-supplied records we load into Tripod for many of our e-resources. Because eresource packages such as Ebrary, Naxos Music Library and Early English Books Online often contain thousands of titles, it wouldn’t be feasible to manually
create individual bibliographic records. Therefore we take data supplied by the vendor, re-format it to create records with links to the e-resources, and load them into Tripod. While the records provide a way for students and faculty to discover an e-resource, they are a bit of a compromise and often don’t contain the level of detail we would include in a normal bibliographic record. For example, records for films in the Films on Demand package do not include the name of the director. Records for books in the EBL ebook collection contain subject headings; but if the subject includes a geographic location, it is not identified as such. A search filtered to a geographic region could miss these titles. In addition to full record loads, the libraries contract with a vendor to add table of contents data to new bibliographic records. While this data proves to be very useful in keyword searching and item display, there can be a problem with the author names. Since the names are often indexed as they appear on the title page, they are usually inconsistent with the standard form of the name, leading to the author’s name appearing in multiple forms in the author filter. The new Tripod implementation team, mindful of these potential problems, combed through hundreds of bibliographic record field codes in order to determine which data to parse and display in filters. The current filters are likely to be tweaked as we work with the system and gather feedback from patrons. We will likely add a separate filter for group or corporate authors, as we found these headings sometimes overwhelmed the results in the author filter. For example, a search for the title Orientalism by Edward Said resulted in the author name displaying well “below the fold,” following a number of corporate authors such as Ebrary, the United States Department of Justice, the London School of Oriental and African Studies and the University of Chicago Oriental Institute. The librarians are discussing strategies for finding and correcting inconsistent and incorrect data now exposed in the discovery layer. While no library catalog with over two million records will ever be 100% correct, we want to provide users the most complete and accurate data possible. We invite you to report any “dirty data” you find to librarian@swarthmore.edu. We are standing by with virtual scrubbies at hand.
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Tripod merges two products in new catalog by Terry Heinrichs Developing the new Tripod required a great deal of technical work using the skills of library staff from Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges. “We’re at the forefront of academic libraries,” said Spencer Lamm, Swarthmore digital initiatives librarian, since “we are using a multi-channel approach that allows the researchers to customize the search facets after the search has begun.” Facets allow better filtering of content and more precise search results. Many institutions interfile article and book search results but the tri-college libraries decided not to. With interfiling, “You can’t see the books for the trees (the journal articles).” The tricollege libraries join a few others in this decision, like Brown, Villanova, North Carolina State, and Brigham Young.
Many libraries are using VuFind, an open source library search engine developed by Villanova University, to search for books, videos, and recordings in their catalogs. The tri-college libraries are the first to use VuFind together with Primo (an ExLibris product used to search for journal articles), and this meant that code had to be written to accomplish that. Lamm said that we might be sharing that code with other libraries. The tri-college technical group also had to make VuFind work with Millennium, the integrated library system that supports the online transactions and functions of the libraries. More channels will be added to Tripod in the future, like the images and original manuscripts and documents from special collections and digital collections, content from the Hathi Trust, and films and videos.
Behind the scenes: Staff from the tri-colleges collaborated on creating the new Tripod Library Application Team: Spencer Lamm (Swarthmore), Chelsea Lobdell (Tri-college), Anna Headley (Swarthmore) Disco Steering Group: Berry Chamness (Bryn Mawr), Spencer Lamm (Swarthmore), Laurie Allen (Haverford) Selection Committee: Anne Garrison (Swarthmore), Laurie Allen (Haverford), Berry Chamness (Bryn Mawr), Spencer Lamm (Swarthmore), Donna Fournier (Swarthmore), Arleen Zimmerlee (Bryn Mawr), Dora Wong (Haverford), Mary Lynn Morris Kennedy (Haverford), Chelsea Lobdell (Tri-college) VuFind (Books & More) implementation group: Jeremy Blatchley (Bryn Mawr), Kate Carter (Swarthmore), Adam Crandell (Haverford), Chelsea Lobdell (Tri-college), Amy McColl (Swarthmore), Pat O’Donnell (Swarthmore) Primo (Articles) implementation group: Amy Rojek Mayer (Bryn Mawr), Margaret Schaus (Haverford), Melanie Maksin (Swarthmore), Chelsea Lobdell (Tri-college), Arleen Zimmerlee (Bryn Mawr) User Experience team: Adam Crandell (Haverford), Dora Wong (Haverford) , Chelsea Lobdell (Tri-college), Andrew Patterson (Bryn Mawr), Jeremy Blatchley (Bryn Mawr), Susan Dreher (Swarthmore), Anne Garrison (Swarthmore) Marketing & Training: Adam Crandell (Haverford), Susan Dreher (Swarthmore), Arleen Zimmerlee (Bryn Mawr)
New electronic resources in the college library by Amy McColl There are several new resources available in 2012: EBL ebooks – over 43,000 electronic books, which can be read online or downloaded to your iPhone, iPad, Nook, laptop, or Sony eReader. Records for each book can be found in Tripod. For more info on using EBL and other ebooks in our collections, go here: http://triportal.brynmawr.edu/guides/Tips/417/ Project MUSE ebooks – Swarthmore purchased content for the Political Science/Policy Studies and the Film/Theater/Performing Arts subject collections for the years 2010-2012. These ebooks are available in PDF format by chapter, and can be downloaded to any device that handles PDF files. Project MUSE ebooks can be cross-searched with MUSE journals, and records will be loaded into Tripod shortly. Mergent and Moody’s Online – A fully searchable database with financial details of over 25,000 active and inactive com4
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panies. Over 300,000 annual reports form globally listed companies, with archive reports for over 10 years. Oxford Bibliographies Online – In addition to the Classics section which we subscribed to last year, we will be adding Latin American Studies and Political Science sections. Several Swarthmore faculty members were heavily involved in the editing of these two sections. Encyclopedia of Power (Sage) – Explores theories and types of personal, social, and institutional power from a variety of social science perspectives Encyclopedia of the U.S. Census (CQ Press) - Highlights changes in the Census Bureau’s data collection and dissemination practices for the 2010 enumeration, including the use of a short-form questionnaire for the actual population count, and the release in late 2010 of the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year data set based on rolling samples of the U.S. population and gathered using the long-form questionnaire.
Spring internship program reveals world of librarians by Pam Harris Librarianship continues to be an exciting and viable career. This semester, seven students have been selected to participate in the eighth Swarthmore College Library spring internship program: Lisa Bao ’14, Jenna Davis ‘12, Jennifer Lopez ’14, MC Mazzocchi ’12, Marcus Mello ’13, Tayarisha Poe ’12, and Amira Silver-Schwartz ‘12. Interns will experience behind-the-scenes functioning of the college library while being exposed to other options within the field: special collections, information architecture, and archives. Highlights of the internship program include visits to local collections, projects in the Rare Book Room, and a panel of intern graduates currently active in the field. According to 2011 data from the Occupational Outlook Handbook, job prospects for traditional librarianship are favorable, and for those with systems and technical experience the prospects are excellent. These projections reflect the wide variety of opportunities available within a field that includes much more than story-time, spectacles, and buns. It is the environment that many professionals find desirable whether in an academic, corporate, non-profit or governmental position: the day-to-day job is rarely predictable or dull.
Now accepting applications: A. Edward Newton Book Collection Competition by Pam Harris Win cash prizes of up to $600 for the best student book collection. Throw your chances in with two-time award winning collector, Ben Goossen ‘13 (will he be submitting an application again?). The Newton Award has the distinction of being the longest-running collegiate book collecting competition in the nation. Started in the 1930s by a renowned Philadelphia book collector, A. Edward Newton, the competition awards cash prizes to the top three Swarthmore students who submit the best essays and annotated bibliographies of their book collections. Examples of previous essays and rules for the competition are available on the library website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/x5033.xml Application deadline is midnight, Friday, March 16. For more information, contact Pamela Harris, pharris1.
photo by Annette Newman
Who replies to your suggestions? by Lucy Saxon reference & instruction intern
Have you ever noticed the McCabe Suggestion Book? Have you ever read through it? Have you ever wondered who responded? In case you are new to the Suggestion Book, you can anonymously leave comments, suggestions, or requests. It’s at the Circulation Desk. I will write back and address your comment or question. For your convenience, you can now post comments and questions on our Swarthmore College Library Facebook Page as well, and I’ll respond to you there. Hope to hear from you soon!
2011 book sale most successful ever by Amy McColl The Swarthmore College Library annual book sale took place from October 21-23, to coincide with Garnet Homecoming and Family Weekend. Offerings ranged from art books to children’s books, from Spanish and French fiction, to LPs and DVDs. The sale was a fabulous success, bringing in more than $3,800 that will be used to support library internships and programming. Thanks to all who stopped by the sale. We look forward to seeing you next year! @library.edu Spring 2012
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Library staff involved in staff development week At the Employee Showcase on January 12, the final event in Staff Development Week at Swarthmore, library staff members shared personal and professional interests. Lucy Saxon, above, displays artists’ books from the Abecedarium exhibit; Roxanne Lucchesi, left, holds a kitten from the Animal Coalition of Delaware County, Inc.; and Danie Martin, below, shows her bike, clothes, and medals from a triathlon she participated in. Library staff members were also involved in other ways in the three-day event: Pam Harris, Mary Marissen, and Mary Ann Wood served on the 2012 Staff Development Week planning group. Pam Harris and Lucy Saxon conducted a session called “Apple and Oranges: All about e-Books, Tablets, and e-Readers.”
photos by Annette Newman
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Rare Book Room
New artists’ books acquired by library by Anne Garrison
Migration : a field guide to love that was and might have been Faulkenberry, Lauren (text, images, printing and binding) Tuscaloosa : Firebrand Press, 2010
Quarantine Boland, Eavan Images and design by Charles Hobson San Francisco : Pacific Editions, 2011
Woo_den\clouds : an exploration of language in unusual juxtapositions Pfeiffer, Werner Red Hook, NY : Pear Whistle Press, 2011
Pathways Chadwick, Macy Oakland, Calif.: In Cahoots Press, 2010
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Wildly Human Exhibition: February 2—April 2 McCabe Library Lobby A selection of artworks that reflect the ways in which animal imagery expresses varied aspects of humanity, this exibit is being curated by List Gallery interns Elizabeth Laplace, Francesca Bolfo, and Soomin Kim. The exhbit includes works by these established and emerging artists from the mid-Atlantic region: Josh Dorman, Brian Meunier, Jackie Hoving, Anne Canfield, Elizabeth Albert, Lynnette Shelley, and Michael Ahn. photo by Annette Newman
Exhibit curators Soomin Kim, Francesca Bolfo, and Elizabeth Laplace
Celebrating Bayard Rustin Exhibition: April 5 – June 15 McCabe Library Lobby Bayard Rustin (1912-1987), practitioner of non violence, political theorist, adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr., organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights, fighter for economic and social justice for African Americans, internationalist, homosexual, and musician will be celebrated in this exhibit. Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1912, and later attended Cheney University. In the late 1930s, Rustin moved to New York City and immersed himself in progressive politics of the day. By the early 1950s, the U.S. peace movement began thinking of Rustin as the “American Gandhi” due to his work in the civil rights movement, practice of non-violence, and actions against war. The Swarthmore College Peace Collection will exhibit original documents, photographs, and sound recordings illustrating the life and work of this extraordinary American.
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Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister of India, and Bayard Rustin