SMUG (Oct 2009)

On the 20th Ocotober I attended the EPUG-UKI-SMUG Dayschool (Exlibris Product User Group - UK & Ireland - SFX and Metalib User Group).
Here are some of my highlights from the day:

Xerxes
Graham Seaman (Royal Holloway University London) gave a presentation on Xerxes, a interface replacement for Metalib. The Xerxes project was developed at the California State University with the following objective:

The goal of the project is to create an intuitive and highly customizable metasearch system, using the Metalib X-Server, WorldCat API, and other services.

Homepage for the project: http://xerxes.calstate.edu/
Codepage for the project: http://code.google.com/p/xerxes-portal/

At present there are a number of installations live at Cal State and around eleven other installations that are reported to be live. One of which is at Royal Holloway, which is the only UK installation reported to be live.

I spoke to Graham about his installation at RHUL and some of the issues that he addressed as part of the process. He was very positive about the interface, the ease of installation, and the fact it can be run in parallel to the standard interface. I have contacted Graham regrading seeing his installation in action and am awaiting his reply.

MetaLib (and SFX) and Shibboleth – the experience one year on
James Fisher (Coventry university) spoke about their experiences of Shibboleth. There were some interesting parts to the presentation such as how Coventry have constructed wayfless URLs in Metalib (wayfless URLs are links to resources that bypass the need for the user to indicated which institution they are from). James also showed how wayfless URLs in SFX were very problematic. Ron Lozinsky (Exlibris SFX Knowledge Base Manager) did state that Exlibris were committed to finding a way to provide wayfless URLs in SFX.
James went on to explain that there were increased user authentication problems with Shibboleth as opposed to Athens and the overall user experience was much worse. This should be something that we should prepare for as much as possible when we finally implement Shibboleth. JISC has commissioned a study into this area: http://sites.google.com/site/publisherinterfacestudy/

Implementing bX at the University of Manchester
Andy Land (University of Manchester) gave a presentation on bX. More info here:
My blog post on bX
bX homepage

There was some discussion about the quality of the recommendations that are derived from the statistics. Also some discussion on the possibility of recursive recommendations. This is where an item is recommended and then clicked on by the user making that item far more likely to be recommended again. This causes a situation whereby the recommendation becomes recursive by being recommended more and more often. However, analyses of David Patterns home-grown recommender service shows that the opposite may be true...read the paragraphs that directly follow slide 9: http://www.daveyp.com/blog/archives/1317

James also talked about a US bias of recommendations. This is probably because the US has far more institutions contributing to the bX recommendations that the UK. We discussed (on twitter) the possibility of a national recommender service rather than a global one to circumvent this issue. There may be scope for just such a service via the MOSAIC project: http://www.sero.co.uk/jisc-mosaic.html

The monthly KB updates – sharing good practice
Anna Grigson (Royal Holloway University of London) shared how she has extended the KB update process to make the system more effective and efficient. Royal Holloway export records from SFX for inclusion in ALEPH, which is something we do not do here.

SFX, MARC records and the LMS – four case studies

Importing SFX MARC records into ALEPH using XML Marc
(Ann Munn, University of Westminster)

Importing SFX MARC records into Voyager
(Ray Delahunty, University of the Arts London)

Importing SFX MARC records into Millennium
(Caroline Thorpe, Sheffield Hallam University)

Importing SFX MARC records into Talis
(Chris Keene, University of Sussex)

All these presentation showed how difficult it is to import records into the LMS. Not one of the methods used was without its difficulties, problems, or compromises. This is something we do not do here, but have considered in the past. Given that the library systems community is moving toward URD products (see blog post here) and URD products can display information from the disparate sources in one search, it seems unlikely we would put any development into importing SFX records here. A number of others echoed these sentiments stating that it was far easier to display SFX items in a URD product than export them to the LMS.

Reference, Citations and Linking – OpenURL and the TELSTAR project
Owen Stephens (Open University) spoke about the TELSTAR project...the project homepage is here: http://www.open.ac.uk/telstar/
Rather than give us an overview of TELSTAR, Owen concentrated on one aspect of the project: what is a reference and how to link to a source. He concluded that a reference has two purposes:

1. To give credit to a piece of work
2. To locate the source of that work

One of the problems that the TELSTAR project is trying to overcome is linking to online material in a world where material is ever changing. For example when linking to a news page on the BBC, that page is updated daily at least. This means a reference that was correct at the point of viewing will become out of date very quickly and the original information will not be accessible. Owen has devised a system using OpenURLs to identify references to on-line material. The system looks interesting, and would be greatly enhanced if there was some kind of digital preservation mechanism to historical web pages.