Improving tagging in del.icio.us

When it comes to bookmarking things on the web, I am a moderate to heavy user of del.icio.us. I've got three accounts, each of which is for different purposes:

1. sharing links with my wife
   
2. indexing posts on this blog
   
3. bookmarking things that I need/want for professional purposes
   

The third one, which I set up in 2004, is where most of the action is. I've got nearly 900 items in that third account, which averages out to nearly five posted items a week. I'll be the first to admit that my tagging system, while personally meaningful and usable, is probably inconsistent and shows that I made a wise decision in not becoming a cataloger.

I would like some help in thinking up what tags to add to any site I want to bookmark. I have a wishlist of things that del.icio.us could do to improve the tagging experience. Basically, I'd like more suggestions of tags. Those suggestions could come from many different sources.

First, delicious would automatically extract meaning from the page you want to bookmark. I'm thinking here of what a semantic web tool like Calais can do (I wrote earlier in the year about an experiment I did with Calais analyzing one of my blog posts). The tags suggested by the extraction process would come from whatever set of sources and taxonomies you prefer, such as Library of Congress Subject Headings, MeSH, Steve (not me but the social tagging of art objects project), LibraryThing tags (including just my tags), tags from other social bookmarking services, etc.

Next, you would also see tags from your friends on del.icio.us. It's likely that most of the people I would friend in del.icio.us would be other people working in libraries and archives; they would probably prefer the same terminology I do and offer up useful suggestions to me. I would like it if I could get del.icio.us to search my FriendFeed account to see which friends that I have there also have del.icio.us accounts and automatically add them to my delicious network.

Finally, I would continue to see (as I do now) a set of tags recommended by others on delicious who have bookmarked the same site I want to add. Del.icio.us would give me options in my account settings that would let me decide how I want to prioritize the list of recommended tags (what sources of tag suggestions would come first; how would they be grouped, if at all, etc.)

In short, when I am ready to bookmark a page in del.icio.us, I want the service to offer me the wisdom of the crowds (and, in the case of automatic extraction, the wisdom of machines). I don't want, though, just the crowds who are bookmarking in del.icio.us but also those who are cataloging, classifying, and tagging in lots of other places.

On not being scammed

In the past month, I've received a couple of emails from "Fiona King" asking me to write about some library-related content on two different web sites that both focus on distance ed. I didn't pay much attention to those email messages, the like of which I mostly receive from vendors hoping that I'll mention their product on my blog (which, by the way, I never do).

I noticed that a few bloggers, though, had decided to post links to the blog posts that Fiona had suggested. Wondering who was behind the distance ed sites where those blog posts resided, I did a little investigating and discovered:

• neither site has any sort of "about us" or "who we are" content (first red flag)
• each site had a different person who registered it (learned this by doing a whois lookup)
• after googling the two people who registered the sites, learned that they are in business together and hope to get "fabulously rich" through SEO efforts and viral marketing of their blog network
• after searching the web for info on "Fiona King," I came to the conclusion that she is the creation of the two bottomfeeders who created the distance ed sites

Although the content that "Fiona" asks us to link to is somewhat interesting, the methods that are being used to get us to link to it and the ulterior motives of the folks behind these emails is troubling at best. I have no interest in linking to their content just to help them "monetize" blogs under their control. They'll have to find other ways to make money not involving me.

Urban Library Journal to be open access

I was pleased to learn yesterday that Urban Library Journal is going open access. Work is underway to put the content of the most recent issue online and to explore whether digitization of back issues is feasible. The editors have submitted a request to be added to the Directory of Open Access Journals and applied for an ISSN for electronic serials.

In an earlier post, I explored how many open access journals are indexed in Wilson's Library Literature. Urban Library Journal is already indexed there; once it goes open access, we'll be able to add one more journal to the list of OA journals in Library Literature.

If you're interested in submitting an article, please do! Urban Library Journal occupies an interesting niche in the world of library publications and welcomes new material.

Linking to my online life

I've been fooling around with a number of different ways to display links to the many online communities I am part of and have yet to settle on one. My latest is retaggr, which helped me build this little card for embedding in web pages:



(Thanks, Nicole Engard, for alerting me to this service.)

You can also follow my online activities by friending me in FriendFeed, which aggregates the feeds from many the online services I participate in.

If you're reading this post now via email or in a feed reader, you're not seeing yet another tool I used to display some of the services I use online: ShowYourself. On my blog, there's a little widget displayed in the upper right corner that links to some but not all of my services and communities.

I am still looking for the ideal tool that will let me:

• create a well-designed card that can be embedded on web pages and HTML email messages
• link to every last stinking service I can think of (and provide the appropriate icon for each. service)
  

Open access books: a personal anecdote

All I can say at the moment is, "D'oh!" Last week, I ordered a paperback copy of Yochai Benkler's book, the Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. I had completely forgotten that when the book was first published, I had been excited by the news that you could read the book for free because the author had convinced his most excellent publisher (Yale University Press) that it was worth doing. And now I guess I've made the author's case that just because the book is freely available online, there will still be some folks willing to pony up $18 for the edition published by Yale.

Choosing between self-archived articles and the publisher's version

With preprint and postprint options for self-archiving now often available to authors of journal articles, it seems like the range of potential access points has expanded from what used to be the case in the past. Someone trying to track down an article might find it:

• as a preprint in an institutional repository or a discipline-specific repository (the author of the article would have put it there prior to the peer-review, acceptance, or publication of that article in a journal)
• as the official version published by the journal and found in print or online (this assumes that the reader is affiliated with a library that has an online or print subscription to the journal. or that the library has a database with full-text access to that journal, or that the library is willing to get it via ILL)
  
• as a postprint copy of the article, usually found in an institutional repository or a discipline-specific repository (again, it is up the author to see that it gets deposited, although as Dorothea Salo explains well, this task is usually handled by the person managing the repository, a situation referred to as "mediated deposit.")
  

I've previously written about the challenges of knowing what discovery tools work best for finding articles in OA repositories; now I'd like to focus on the complexities of how to help a patron who has found two or more different versions of an article (for example, a postprint located in an OA repository and the published version in a database) and wants to know which one he/she should prefer. My instinct is to go with the published version, as that may be the one most likely to be free of any possible typographical errors (although one can imagine a scenario where a journal version had a typo and the author deposited a corrected postprint edition in an OA archive). Does anyone have any experience helping researchers make these kinds of choices?

Open access journals in Library Literature

I did a quick review of how many open access journals are covered in the Wilson database, Library Literature and Information Science Index (Library Lit). For the list of open access journals in library and information science, I relied on a subject list in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). I then looked Wilson's list of journals covered, which conveniently enough offered a field of data for each journal on whether it was open access. Here are the numbers:

Number of all journals in Library Lit.: 417
Number of open access journals in Library Lit.: 30
Number of open access journals in LIS in the DOAJ: 87

It is worth noting that the list of open access journals indexed in Library Lit. includes 13 titles that are not on the DOAJ list of LIS journals. Some of those 13 titles are now defunct. The open access journal, First Monday, is indexed by Library Lit, but the DOAJ lists it in the computer science category not the LIS one. I'm not sure why some of the still active OA journals that Wilson lists are not on the DOAJ site.

I've also marked up this copy of the DOAJ page of LIS journals to indicate which ones specifically are covered by Library Lit. It could be that the selection criteria used by DOAJ is more stringent, or it could just be that someone needs to suggest to DOAJ that these journals be added.

You may be wondering, "So, what's your point, Stephen?" I got started with this project because I was wondering how well OA journals were being indexed by the subscription databases we refer our students to. From the look of my little survey, Library Literature could be doing better. Are some subscription databases better than others for covering OA journals? If I want to search OA journals using a free web search engine, what would be the best one:

• Google Scholar
• Live Search Academic
  
• DOAJ: Find Articles
• OAIster
  

Is there something else I could be using freely? Is there instead a tool that will not only index OA journals but also content in OA repositories? I realize that there are a number of tools that are discipline specific; I'm looking for a way to search for OA content across the broadest possible range of disciplines. Any ideas?

Referring patrons to open access resources

As I've been reading up on open access journals and open access archives (AKA open access repositories), I've been wondering to what extent I have been intentionally and unintentionally guiding patrons to these resources. I have to admit that I can't remember a time when I explicitly referred a student to search for content in an open access archive or suggested they use a tool to locate articles in OA journals.

I do know that several databases I recommend and demonstrate index OA journals (Medline is the best example of such a database), but I am curious to find out whether other databases I rely on have many OA journal titles covered. My library subscribes to over 200 databases, including large clumps of them via Proquest, EBSCOhost, and Wilson. I think I am going to do a little research project to see what OA journals are covered in a few databases. Doing this sort of a project comprehensively is probably something more appropriate for research in service of a journal article, so for now I'll maybe check to see what OA journals in library and information science are indexed in Wilson's Library Literature. I sure hope I find that my favorite OA journal in LIS is there: Evidence-Based Library and Information Science Practice.

Video of my presentation on social networking sites and reference services

The video is finally online from my presentation at ALA Midwinter last January in which I spoke on the use of social networking sites for reference services. Following me on the video are Beth Evans talking about how the Brooklyn College library uses its MySpace page and David Lankes talking about his vision of the ideal online reference interface. (Here's a bummer of an FYI: the video will only play in Internet Explorer.)

My slides are also available separately.

Reference desk scratchpad

I thought I'd share a handout I created for the reference desk at my library. For many years, when we were helping someone at the desk and wanted to write down some suggested search words or databases or web sites to try, we reached for a stack of scratch paper. Now, we've got a handy little form created in Microsoft Word that presents our notes to the patrons in a more structured manner. Librarians can fill this out as they see fit.

The form is divided into four sections:

1. Authors/Producers of Information. Here the librarian can write in a schematic way any specific people, organizations, or scholarly disciplines likely to be producing information relevant to the patron.
2. Databases. There is space for the librarian to write the name of databases and some notes about what specifically each one can be used for (for PsycINFO, I might write "articles by psychologists").
3. Keywords. There is a grid of boxes where librarians can cluster like related terms in a cells. This then makes it easy to write below some recommended search statements that include nested searches, as the boxes are meant to convey the idea of parentheses or the multiple boxes offered on advanced search screens.
4. Other Resources. This is a free area where we find ourselves writing down specific books and call numbers, web site URLs, etc.

The copies we use at our desk are two-sided. To help the handouts stand out from the mass of paper that students collect as they print out articles and web sites, we printed them on colored paper. If you find this handout useful, feel free to use it and adapt it as you see fit (no attribution or thanks is required).

How Wikipedia stacked up against subscription databases

I finished up my quick comparison of Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, Gale Virtual Reference Library, and Oxford Reference that I blogged about earlier today.

My Plan
Do quick look ups of nineteen terms and concepts discussed in Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody to see what reference sources would be more helpful to the students I work with.

Methodology
Using quotation marks around search terms to force phrase searches, I looked in the following resources:

• Wikipedia
• Encyclopedia Britannica
• Gale Virtual Reference Library
• Oxford Reference

In any given set of search results, I would look first for main entries that mirrored my search terms exactly and record any such precise hits in a table. If there were no exact hits, then I looked for any entries in which most of my search terms were in the main entry (such as an entry on "social network services" when I searched for "social networks"). If none of my search words were in the main entry, then I looked for entries in which the search words appeared in the body of the entry and were adequately defined and explained (as opposed to simply cited or referenced in an offhand way).

If a particular resource had multiple main entries on the topic (as was the case in Gale Virtual Reference Library and Oxford Reference), then I made a note in my table that there other entries as well.

Caveats

• Shirky's book is all about the ways that the latest technologies (especially on the web and on cell phones) have allowed people to organize in new ways that threaten the centrality of long-standing institutions and organizations. Wikipedia's entries can be created at any time by anyone, making it far more likely that this source will have entries on the latest tech developments. The other three sources all are reproducing content that was first published in book form, which means that there is a long lag time between the writing of the content and its appearance online, thus making it less likely that the technology topics will be as up to date as Wikipedia's.
• The subscription from Baruch College to Gale Virtual Reference Library includes nearly 1100 reference sources originally published as printed editions. Each library's subscription to this database is likely to have a different set of sources in it.
• The subscription to Oxford Reference I used has close to 270 sources in it. Most of the sources are subject dictionaries whose entries tend to be much briefer than the entries I was finding in Wikipedia and the other two databases
• Although I refrained from doing any fancy searching (no fielded searches or adjacency operators), I did use quotation marks around my terms, something that many students are unlikely to bother doing. Students who don't do phrase searching are more likely to see that mishmash of results returned as more off-putting and believe they're "not finding anything good."
• I didn't analyze the quality of results in any deep way. I just wanted to see if there was at least an adequate overview or definition of the topic in each source.
• There's no presentation of what the actual search results looked up. Some sources gave many false hits that would have frustrated most searchers (e.g., "long tail" turned up pages of entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica that were on individual animals that happened to have long tails, which is not quite the same concept that Shirky was referring to).
  

Results
As you can see from the updated table of results, Wikipedia and Gale Virtual Reference Library both do pretty well and Encyclopedia Britannica fared the worst. With the Wikipedia entries, you have the added bonus of extensive linking to related Wikipedia entries, a reference list, and a set of links to external web sites. Gale Virtual Reference Library entries featured reference lists most of the time and some linking to other entries in the database.

While most of the topics were covered in all four sources, I found it interesting which sources had a main entry on the topic vs. which ones covered the topic in some other entry. For all but two topics, Wikipedia had a separate entry on each topic. This is not surprising, given that in Wikipedia, which is born digital, there is all the space in the world for yet another page, while the other three sources are all born in print, where each additional page added means greater printing costs.

For Further Research
My colleague Jerry Bornstein reminded me today that we once had discussed doing an analysis of the content of entries in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. Some day, I hope do that but also include the other two databases I looked in this project.

Wikipedia vs. Subscription Reference Sources

Last week, I mentioned that a group of students on a panel discussing how they do research all spoke of using Wikipedia to do background research on topics, ideas, concepts, etc., before diving in to find books and articles in our subscription databases. I've decided to undertake a little (unscientific) experiment to see how wise a course that may actually be. I've been reading Clay Shirky's great new book, Here Comes Everybody, for the past week and find it's chockablock with ideas from different disciplines. In the next week or so, I'll take a handful of concepts in the Shirky book and look them up in:

• Wikipedia
• Encyclopedia Britannica
  
• Gale Virtual Reference Library
• Oxford Reference Online

I want to see how many of the concepts I look up are main entries in these different resources (the latter three are ones that my library subscribes to). I realize that this experiment has a few flaws:

• Shirky's book focuses on technology topics, a subject that Wikipedia is highly regarded for in its coverage
• Gale Virtual Reference Library is not really a database per se but more of a platform allowing a library to subscribe to a customized collection of reference books in electronic form; no two libraries are likely to have the same collection of books
• Oxford Reference Online subscriptions allow you to subscribe to different packages of reference sources; like Gale Virtual Reference Library, libraries do not all have the same collection

I've created a table in Google Docs that I'll update as I work on it. Feel free to check in on the document from time to time, but also be aware that I'll post a new blog entry to let everyone know I've finished the project.

Why don't our students ask for help?

Today, at the college where I work, we held a conference on general education programs that featured a panel discussion at which four students (two first-year students and two sophomores) discussed how they do research. Prodded by questions by the moderator (my colleague, Jerry Bornstein), the students spoke about how they often use Wikipedia for background research; how they all rely on databases (Academic Search Premier, LexisNexis, ebrary, the library catalog, and our federated search tool were all named by them); and how often they get research paper assignments (in the first few years, they typically only had one or two).

What really caught the attention of every librarian in the room was the agreement among all four students they had never asked a question at our reference desk or via our email and chat services. The most explanation they were able to offer as to why they had not asked for help was that they felt they did not need to. It's possible that since the students have only had few research assignments, they haven't really been pushed yet to research difficult topics or tackle large projects that require the use of many different kinds of resources.

Last fall, we had a similar panel discussion with students held just for the benefit of library staff. That panel also consisted of four students, all of whom were juniors and seniors. They all reported regular use of our reference services in all its incarnations. So it may be that the first-year students and sophomores in today's panel may find that by their junior and senior years they are asking reference questions. Clearly, a rigorous survey of all students would be an interesting project to purse. As far I know, there has not been a whole lot of research into how often college students ask reference questions at a college library, but I suspect it would yield a power law distribution (FYI: Clay Shirky has nice section on power law distributions and social systems in chapter five of Here Comes Everybody, which I'm reading now).

I wonder which combination of these reasons might be behind the reluctance of student to ask for help:

• They don't want to ask a "dumb question" or appear incapable of doing the research themselves.
• Libraries and research make them anxious.
• They don't know they need help.
• They're overconfident.
  
• They really don't need our help.
  
• They forget that reference services exist.
• They don't know that reference services exist.
• They had a bad reference experience elsewhere that turned them off the service.

Will an increase in marketing our reference services dramatically improve the number of questions we get asked? Of course any promotion is going to help boost the count of questions we get in reference, but will it ever make a dramatic effect or is there something more fundamental going on inhibiting our students from asking for help. (I should note that our library's reference statistics have been pretty stable over the past ten years and have not shown the declines seen at many other academic libraries.)

I guess a good place for me to get started understanding this problem is by reading a 1972 article by Swope and Katzer, "Why Don't They Ask Questions?" (and, of course, reading more from the Seeking Synchronicity project).

Baruch's reference blog

I am really pleased with the way that our library's reference blog, Reference at Newman Library, has continued to thrive after being launched four years ago. We've now posted over 1300 messages (and hundreds of comments, too); our weekly average is about a dozen posts.

When we started the blog, it was intended to do away with the informal and haphazard systems we had to notify each other at the desk of technical problems and to alert each other to new resources and tools. We had been using:

• notes taped to the desk
• a printed reference manual in a 3-ring binder, which is now replaced by our password-protected reference wiki (screenshots)
• emails on internal listservs
• word-of-mouth (i.e., tell the person coming on after you at the desk what to watch out for)

With the blog, we made all that great content easy to publish, easy to share, and easy to find again later. Since most of my colleagues don't like using feed readers to keep up with RSS feeds, I set up a system to forward every post to them via email as soon as the posts are published.

Since we started our blog in Blogger in the days long ago when the service did not offer categories or tags, I've been relying on a del.icio.us account I created to tag all the posts and give multiple entry points back to the content. Every time there's a new post, I tag it in del.icio.us. A link to the del.icio.us index can be found on right column of the blog, allowing my colleagues to scan the subjects covered already on blog posts. There's also a search box, which I hear gets pounded a lot by the staff trying to track down content they recall having seen.

Over time, the blog has turned into a repository of reference question and answer pairs. We often post stumpers to the blog or notable reference questions tied to assignments, which lately have been leading to more and more comments and suggestions from librarians. It's kinda interesting that if you Google Apple audited financial data the first hit is a post from our blog about what database to use to find this information.

As someone who started working at Baruch's library as an adjunct, I know how out of the loop you can feel when you miss out on staff meetings and informal conversations during the workday. A number of the adjuncts have mentioned to me that the blog (and the wiki) are invaluable to them for finding out about things that they might not have otherwise heard of.

Now if only I could convince my colleagues to use Bloglines or Google Reader to keep up with posts from the reference blog (as well as others they might enjoy)...

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