Bookmark - Courtesy of SecretLondon123 on Flickr

I’m often finding I need to collect some good web resources on a topic to share. Whilst we have been using delicious to collect and share our bookmarks, sometimes that doesn’t quite seem to do them justice. Delicious has the following great “pros”:

• Quick and simple to bookmark, particularly with the integrated browser toolbars and buttons
• Tags are powerful and flexible
• RSS feed of tags allows you to embed your bookmarks in the VLE or anywhere else you need to display them
• Graphical display of tag cloud can be a good visual aid
• Others can subscribe to your RSS feed (or any combination of tags) to keep up with what you are bookmarking

It also has a few “cons”, mostly on the display side:

• Not much space to add your own comments to a link (1000 characters) and no formatting e.g. you cannot include another URL in a comment. (This is something I feel quite strongly about as a user/student – don’t just give me a list of resources, tell me why they are important!)
• It’s not pretty: very basic display with no images or graphics to make it look nicer.
• Limited control with RSS feed or delicious to order how your links are displayed e.g. you cannot choose how to prioritize them

So I have been investigating a few social bookmarking tools which add a bit more functionality. This may be of use to LRC staff or teachers who need to show their students a collection of web resources with some added guidance notes. Some of the resources below can also be embedded in a VLE or website quite easily. They provide a more controlled and graphical way to peruse a collection of web resources without having to repeatedly open new windows or tabs. Some of this could be accomplished by the Intute Informs tool. This resource is currently limited to UK HE and FE but is soon moving to a subscription model. Here I have limited my search to free, open tools. I only had a fairly quick chance to look through some of these but here are some I tried earlier:

1) Diigo has social bookmarking and more. You can bookmark a site, tag it, add it to a list, highlight areas of a webpage, add sticky notes to the web page, collaborate on it, share your collection, display it as a “webslide”. All rich, good functionality with a pleasing interface plus a powerful Firefox Toolbar (presumably other browsers too). I like the Webslides (Short example: http://slides.diigo.com/list/rscsam/Using-Maps-in-Education) but am struggling to get any notes to appear. The one at the beginning is dominated by adverts. You can only add public notes once you are a “trusted user” to avoid spam. Requires more homework for me! It is still in beta.

2) LiveBinders – a way to collect things in web “binders”. This not only includes bookmarking websites but you can also add other content such as documents/images. There is a good blog post on how it could be used in education, even as a free portfolio tool if privacy and reliability (it’s a 3^rd party tool after all) aren’t too much of an issue. I have to say I find the interface very clunky indeed and it displays like an old-school Powerpoint, but the basic functionality is good. You can see a short example here: http://livebinders.com/play/present?id=18332.  There is the option to embed the Binder in another website too.

3) JogtheWeb is another site in beta but it has a very good, clean interface. I had a few teething troubles getting my account going and also it didn’t seem to like my Netvibes page so I had to take that out, but otherwise it seems to work very well. Here’s a very short example: http://www.jogtheweb.com/run/BWbNivxOG8Xn/RSC-Wales-Learning-Resources.

4) Back to Delicious which now has a beta option to “Browse these Bookmarks”.

Screenshot from Delicious

This means you can stepthrough the websites one by one. However you do not get to see any added description or text and there is no control of the sequence other than the order in which they were added (most recent first) so it is really quite limited. You can save a link to a presentation but it is not obvious. You do have the option to save to your own delicious quite easily if browsing someone else’s bookmarks so this is more of an enhancement to using Delicious for resource discovery. A useful option but not so much a tool in its own right. Try it here with RSC Wales’ Media Literacy Resources: http://delicious.com/browsebar/user/rscwales/media_literacy#id=5802f3c4a627d1da9c9dc30035139efe-0

These are just a handful of sites that I have tried and there are plenty more out there. The fact that several of them are in beta means it is probably not a good idea to put all your resource eggs in one basket until they have become truly established players in the social bookmarking world. Even so, it is good to experiment with new methods of displaying useful resources which may entice more students to take notice.

Image from Conduit toolbars video

One of the most common queries that Sam and I get is to do with how to promote e-resources in order to increase take-up by staff and students. There are some ideas in the RSC Wales E-resources information area, but an idea that has popped up a few times recently is that of using customised toolbars.

The basic idea is that a toolbar is created that links to (or in some cases searches) the library’s resources, making it easier for users to find quality information for their teaching and learning (see this article). Not all toolbar solutions cost anything – for every company such as Besttoolbars which sells toolbar solutions, there are free options such as the Google Toolbar for Firefox, or Conduit. There are even specialist browser-plugin toolbars for libraries, such as LibX. These can do much more than just link to resources. A selection from the LibX feature list includes:

• The “Magic Button” – simply select an article title and have Scholar & the OpenURL resolver deliver an appropriate (accessible, “paid-for”) copy. This is a feature we use daily for our own research, it’s proved to be a tremendous time saver.
• Lookups of a complete book title, author, or ISBN – usually by selecting & right-clicking on a webpage.
• Proxying a page or link when coming from off-campus.
• Using cues and autolinking to get from pages that a user frequently uses to the library catalog.

Toolbars that appear as browser plugins could easily be installed across a college, with the advantage that IP address recognition can then allow users straight through to online resources. The LRS could also make the plugin available to users for their home computers and laptops, and in conjunction with appropriate access management (e.g. Shibboleth, or proxy solutions) the user at home could also have a seamless experience.

Note that toolbars don’t have to be something integrated into a browser – with a bit of creative thinking an LRS could incorporate them into their webpages, Moodle, the college desktop or even the OPAC. Let us know if you have tried this kind of approach – and how successful it was!

Web 2.0 is fundamentally changing the expectations of many library users. This may make many library management systems (or rather, the OPAC interface our users see) look increasingly creaky, and resemble the stereotype of librarians, i.e. unfriendly but with hidden powers.

At the same time libraries are watching their budgets carefully, and are not keen to undergo the major project that changing their LMS would be.

This is where a number of companies and products step in, offering to revitalise the OPAC. The recent JISC report ‘Library Management Systems: Investing wisely in a period of disruptive change’ pointed towards this raft of options as a way of solving some LMS problems:

“Others have gained valuable experience through implementing Vertical Search products. The market for complementary products is widening as the LMS vendors have realised it is to their advantage that their ‘add-ons’ work with the LMS from other vendors.”

Commercial discovery tools like Aquabrowser and Primo aim to provide intuitive search interfaces so users can access all resources from within one interface. Not all the options are commercial though – there are many open source projects such as Vufind.

It is also possible to jazz up the OPAC using OPAC enrichment services such as the services offered by Syndetic Solutions. Or you could incorporate virtual shelf browsing i.e. seeing images of books next to each other – see the University of Huddersfield OPAC for an example – scroll down for the shelf browser. (See here for some information on how it was done.)

Aquabrowser demo

Last week I attended a demonstration of one of the commercial product suppliers, Aquabrowser.

To get an idea of what the OPAC may look like if parsed by Aquabrowser go to the list of customers here and follow some of the OPAC links. For an FE option, have a look at the Croydon College implementation. Bear in mind that many libraries have also purchased OPAC enrichment services, so some of the features may not be part of Aquabrowser.

Click to enlarge – a basic results screen with subliminal messages

In the screenshot above you can see the three main features.

1. Search box and results in the centre.
2. A ‘Refine’ box on the right to narrow down results.
3. A ‘Discover’ box on the left which provides alternative terms (synonyms, related terms, variant spellings and so on) which can also be used to refine the results, or to begin a whole new search. Note that this can show up flaws and inconsistencies in the institution’s cataloguing – hopefully an opportunity to correct them!

I’ll just post my immediate thoughts after using Aquabrowser for a while.

The good

• RSS: Aquabrowser generates flexible RSS feeds with no fuss. It is possible to generate a feed for a particular simple search, or a refined search; and for the feed to include all items or just new ones.
• Accessibility: The ‘Discover’ box is animated, and therefore not suitable for screen readers. However Aquabrowser has an alternative URL which generates an interface suitable for screen-readers, due to being text-based and with a revised box order. Click to enlarge the screenshot below to see what it looks like.

Possible concerns:

• Admin: Aquabrowser does not work live from the bibliographic data – every night you have to do a bulk upload. Aquabrowser works from that, though communicates live with the LMS regarding circulation data and status. Obviously this can be automated, but is another procedure.
• Stats and reports: Aquabrowser generates its own usage statistics. However because it is working off a database dump none of those statistics will have been recorded by the LMS – apart from circulation statistics etc where AquaBrowser transfers to the host LMS. So if you offer Aquabrowser AND the traditional native OPAC to users, as some institutions do, then your search and access statistics will be split between the two systems. Even if you don’t offer a native interface to the OPAC, the lending statistics will be in one system (the LMS) and the search statistics elsewhere (Aquabrowser) so it will be difficult to run reports combining the two.
• My Discoveries is a social networking add-on for Aquabrowser, enabling reviews, book lists and tagging. The idea is good, and it can be used as a system for reading lists. However the data and accounts are not hosted by the subscribing institution; and the system is not Shibboleth compliant. Users have to create an extra account (on the system seller’s database), which is an inconvenience for users and system administrators. Increasingly libraries are looking to the future with single sign-on systems, so it is a shame that the idea here is good, but the implementation is flawed.
• Powered By: It may just be me, but I find overt publicity of brand names to be a distraction. Aquabrowser says ‘Powered by Aquabrowser’ on most screens, which is something I find irritating. If I am paying a company for something I shouldn’t have to advertise their products on my institutional screens and systems as well. The only brand that I want to show is the brand of my library service, but the person demonstrating Aquabrowser said it is not possible to remove it.

The Internet Resources Newsletter started in 1994, and is still going. It is a useful newsletter for keeping up to date with Internet resources – new websites, blogs etc. And it is free!