Searching on Delicious...

            I set up a Delicious account two years ago for my 2^nd TL course through UBC. I was right away impressed with being able to save my bookmarks in a cloud. I have used Delicious many times when teaching in the library. It is easy to pull up my Delicious account and access websites and Youtube videos that I want to show my students. The funny thing is, I have never once searched on Delicious to find websites related to a topic that I am teaching or interested in. This week is the first time that I have tried that feature.  I decided to use the same topic that I chose for my mini digital library for this course. I found many of the same websites that I had come across when doing research for this library. But, the number of actual hits I got when I typed in “Ancient Egypt” was 3266.  I included the quotation marks to narrow down my search. Without the quotation marks the number of hits was 4720!

            This is the list of related tags that showed up: tags that other Delicious users have come up with on their own. 

 

In this environment, I don’t think that it is a real problem not having a consistent, controlled environment. The results retrieved for “Ancient Egypt” on the Delicious site are already much pared down from the results that would have resulted from a Google search. I did not expect to be presented with a short list of excellent web resources, so what I saw was a bonus. However, in a library situation, I would expect to find all of the available resources show up in my search for “Ancient Egypt” as I know that close attention should be paid to subject headings when cataloguing resources. And, I would expect these resources to be good resources since they were chosen by the teacher-librarian.

            I will continue to use Delicious to store my bookmarks to allow me easy access to them, wherever I am. However, I don’t know that I will conduct many searches on this social bookmarking site for topics of interest for research projects with my students. I much prefer specialized search engines such as DMOZ or Sweetsearch where I know that a website has been evaluated following certain criteria and will only show up in searches if deemed a quality website.

CIP and MARC records

The more I read and the more assignments that I complete for this course, the more I realize how many layers there are to MARC records. At first I found processing the information for writing the code for MARC records to be very overwhelming. Now, I only find it slightly overwhelming! ;)

It was beneficial to write the MARC records from scratch for a number of items while using examples from AMICUS and The Library of Congress to guide me. This week's lesson is helping me fine-tune my MARC records for my digital library project as I am becoming aware of tags that may have been omitted in actual MARC records that would be very beneficial to include in the MARC records that I am writing.

Being able to read about my classmates' experiences when comparing CIP to MARC records has brought up scenarios that I didn't encounter when examining the three books that I chose for Lesson 7 this week. My three books had relatively complete MARC records,  with complete summaries and appropriate subject headings. I did, however, come across a book that had no CIP data and I had never noticed that in a book before. I learned that this might have been because it was a "mass market paperback". From reading my classmates' postings, I saw that some of them had come across books where the MARC records did not contain summaries and had limited subject headings.

In my two years in the library I have learned that if relevant key words are not included in the summaries or in the subject headings, then it will be impossible to locate appropriate books for teachers for popular themes or topics. In the future, as I come across these omissions, I will note them and submit them to our cataloguing department in our district library, as all changes to MARC records must be made by them.

I am now off to improve the MARC records that I have written for the items in my digital library...

Creating MARC records...

This code is complicated... all the more obvious when you compare MARC records for the same book at two different libraries.

I looked at Adrienne Gear's Reading Power: Teaching Students to Think While They Read. I first looked at the MARC record at my elementary school and this is what I saw.

In order to access this MARC record, I  had to be signed in as an administrator. The MARC record was easy to understand, as textual signposts were used. When I looked at the MARC record for the same book at the Vancouver Public Library, this is what I saw. I was able to access the record as a guest.

 

As you can see, no textual signposts were used and symbols were used in place of spaces. I believe that this is because this is the actual code that the computer will read. The call numbers are different for each record and they are recorded in different tags. My school library's MARC record includes a summary, while VPL's does not. I wonder why that is, when there is clearly a summary in the catalogue record for this book in VPL. In fact, the description on the VPL catalogue record is much more detailed than the one at my school, giving a better idea of what the book is about.

There has been much talk in the discussion forum about how involved writing MARC records really is. I was overwhelmed at first (and still am a little...) by all the different tags, indicators and subtags. It seems that the position and choice of symbol for all of these is very important. The more that I write, the more that I understand what I am doing... it is a lot like learning a second language!

Image created at http://www.says-it.com/

Some of my classmates have noticed big discrepancies between the hard copy of the book and the MARC record for that same book. I have not noticed any problems in the books that I have chosen to look at in my own library for this course, but in the past I have noticed that call numbers might not match, or there might be typos in the summaries. One thing that I have come across in my two years in the library is that many books do not come up when doing a keyword search for a certain topic when it is obvious that that certain book fits that topic. I am wondering if adding subject headings to the MARC record could correct this problem.

Access points in our library catalogue in our ever-changing digital world

This past week we were to look at the catalog record for a number of items and check to see if and how the ISBD areas are organized. I chose fairly recent acquisitions to our library and, as such, the entries were quite uniform and complete.

I did notice, however, that the subject headings in the catalog record were few and far between for some items. The most complete list of subject headings was for the DVD: Noémie, le Secret coming in at 10 headings. The other items averaged only 3 subject headings each. I have found this low number of subject headings to be problematic in our library when I am searching for resources on different topics. I may know of a book that fits a certain theme but it will not come up when I do a keyword search for that particular theme.

Another discrepancy that I noticed was the lack of entry for "target audience" for quite of few of the items. This would be beneficial for a teacher, but may not have any bearing on a student's decision to go look for the book. In reading my classmates' postings in the discussion forum this week, I learned that a few others are also working with Follett Destiny and  that some of them have access to TitlePeek. Now, this is a feature that I know appeals to students with the option of seeing the actual book cover, table of contents, excerpts and even published reviews. Unfortunately, it comes as an additional cost to the Follett Destiny package and our district has opted to spend its money elsewhere (after polling all the teacher-librarians).

After spending a week looking at how search engines work, I found the catalog system to be quite inefficient. I have been disappointed when looking for books on different topics to have my searches come up with very few resources when I know that we have good books on the topic. I learned why this week when I saw how few subject headings that each book/resource actually had. I guess that this means that I need to go back and add appropriate subject headings to the different books/resources that support the topics and themes that are taught in the school. This is where the book/resource needs to have a digital record that includes a portion of the book in its record. That way, maybe key words or subject headings wouldn't have to be manually entered? I wonder what the future holds for catalog records...

From here:

 

 

 

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/deborahfitchett/2970373235/

 

 

To who knows where?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/louish/5371825855/

Searching, searching, searching...

This week we were to look at how Google, Yahoo and DMOZ, or The Open Directory, three different search engines, determine relevancy rankings. The best thing that I got out of this exercise was the discovery of DMOZ. When I saw the name, Open Directory, it rang a bell, but I had never tried it. I was pleasantly surprised when the search words that I entered for each search engine turned up the best results in DMOZ.

"Ancient +Egypt +grade +7 +resources" yielded 20 educational sites in DMOZ, and in Google and Yahoo my search yielded mainly irrelevant results.  Because I used Boolean logic (adding "+") to narrow down my results, the number of websites was considerably lower than if I had simply typed in a question or a key phrase with none of the following symbols: +, -, "". 

In the discussion forum this week many of my classmates shared their frustration with the Metadata articles, but they also shared some kid-friendly search engines such as: Kids' Search Tools, Kids Click. I would also like to share SweetSearch as a student-friendly search engine. Joyce Valenza says this about Finding Dulcinea, which operates SweetSearch: "What does FindingDulcinea do right? It organizes. It evaluates. It creates context. It is conscious of design. It gets media."  

Try out your next query on SweetSearch and let me know what you think! 

If you are in a French Immersion school/library and are looking for a good French language search engine, try out La Toile du Québec. I've gotten good results for my searches with this search engine.

What is Metadata?

I knew nothing about Metadata coming into this lesson and at first I found it all quite confusing. I now have a general idea of what it is, but it will require a re-reading of the articles to become more clear on all of its purposes. I think that what was initially holding me back from understanding the intricacies of Metadata was me not being able to see its relevance for digital resources in the library. When I think of digital resources, I think of , first of all, websites that will help students with their learning and research. It has been my experience over the years that when I find a list of websites on a particular topic there are often a few, if not many, dead links. This experience underlines that fact that websites are impermanent. It is for this reason that I don't see the need to spend a lot of time creating Metadata for a list of great websites that the students can use. Why go to all that trouble when the website could no longer be accessible by that URL in who knows how little time?

However, after reading one of Keith's posts where he explains how he writes Metadata on digital resources to include in the library catalogue, I can see how this would be helpful for the students. If a student is looking up information on Ancient Egypt, a list of books and a website or an online database will show up in his/her search results. Having the digital resources listed in the library catalogue will eliminate the additional step of checking out the library website for a list of websites provided by the teacher-librarian.

Something else that I realized when reading about Metadata, in the lesson material for the course, was that Metadata can be as simple or as complex as you would like it to be. It is simply another way to organize resources to make them easier for patrons to find.

I get it!!

Access

There was a lot of lively discussion this past week for Lesson 2 on "Access". We were asked to reflect on "access" related to the library, how our library dealt with it and how committed we were to "access".

Below is a shortened list of a teacher-librarian's responsibilities included in Lesson 2 of LIBE 465:

1) Acquisition

• budgeting
• evaluation
• selection
• purchasing

2) Organization and maintenance

• cataloguing and processing
• analyzing the collection
• weeding

3) Circulation

• automation
• access (including location of resources)
• security

As Elizabeth wrote in her comment for this week's lesson all of these duties affect students' and teachers' access to the library. My comment was, "Access is of utmost importance to a library. For without access, what is the purpose of the library? Cutting back on time given to Teacher-Librarians most definitely has an impact on access to resources. Although the teachers and students may be able to enter the library and ultimately consult and borrow books, they may not be fully aware of what the library has to offer without the guidance of a Teacher-Librarian." Both my comments and Elizabeth's comments focus on the duties of the teacher-librarian. Elizabeth talks about the behind-the-scenes duties and my comment is more about the face-to-face duties. Both are equally important. If you don't have an excellent, well organized collection that meets the needs of the patrons, then the patrons will not come to the library. But, if you don't have a teacher-librarian in the library, then the patrons won't be able to access the excellent collection.

This week, I also got into some discussion about having Young Adult fiction in an elementary library. This relates to "access" as well, in two ways. One, we want the library to have materials that will meet the needs of the upper intermediate students. For, if they don't find books of interest to them in the library, then they may not want to visit. Secondly, we don't want the primary students to have unlimited access to books meant for older students. This type of access is hard to control in my library as it is an open library that anyone can enter at anytime and our library is only staffed the equivalent of 3 days a week. I did not find a suitable solution to my problem, even after much discussion, so I will not be having a Young Adult shelf in my library in the near future. I am open to ideas on how to solve this problem and will continue to look for a solution. Do you have any ideas?

In closing, I am pleased to say that I have the problem where more classes want to work with me in the library than I have time for. Sounds like a funny problem, but maybe I could add this example to some advocacy projects geared to increase TL staffing in my library...

(I created this image on Image Chef.)