Some more stray thoughts about online catalogues

There was an article in today's Guardian about the Dyslexie font which is designed to be bottom-heavy to help people with Dyslexia: the idea is that the asymmetry of the characters makes it harder for them to dance about for the reader. Coincidentally, a conversation I'd had with somebody last weekend had set me thinking about how a library could present appropriate parts of its stock to dyslexic readers.A gallery display of book covers is an obvious format but wouldn't it be nice to have the accompanying text for that section of the catalogue in a Dyslexia-friendly font? I expect it's do-able; it would be interesting to see someone give it a go.

Stray thoughts on the library catalogue

This is a frustrating time for me, I admit: we're in the process of recommissioning our OPAC and I can see all sorts of possibilities with the new version but I have to take a few steps back because it's somebody else's baby. A couple of years ago my rôle changed from library systems development to more general corporate systems management and support so it's my job to make sure the system underlying the OPAC works but the development work is somebody else's to do and I have to be careful to get in the way.

I'll jot stuff down on here once in a while just to get ideas out of my system.

Project Gutenberg catalogue records

A belated tip of the hat to Steve Thomas at the University of Adelaide for providing MARC records for Project Gutenberg titles. This is immensely useful and helps us add some real depth to the online elements of our catalogue with very little effort on our part (and nothing but admiration for the colossal amount of effort that people have put in to make this project such an incredibly important, useful and entertaining resource).

Library audiences: talking to the other 54%

A couple of months back I had an interesting Twitter conversation with some local government comms folk which got me wondering why so few English public library services have much in the way of child-centred content on their web sites. I asked the very splendid Ian Anstice if he could canvass for examples of good practice on his Public Libraries News site. The good news is that he got some positive responses, including Devon's "The Zone" and Stories from the Web; the bad news is that there are so very few examples. Ian's musings on this point are here.

For me there are a few contributory factors to this famine:

• The web is still seen as largely "something other" to the public library's service offer. At best a way of promoting activities in the library and somewhere to keep the catalogue and the e-books; at worst an abstraction of resources from beleaguered libraries. (There are plenty of exceptions to that rule, thank Heaven!)
• If you're doing it right it's going to take time and people to do it. These are increasingly scarce resources.
• It's difficult to reconcile the needs of a children's page with those of a council's corporate branding, particularly if the brand requires a single monolithic corporate voice.
• It's a complex and sometimes unforgiving audience: what's great for a five year-old may be acceptable to a seven year-old but puerile to a nine year-old and beyond the pale to an eleven year-old.
• There's often a confusion as to whether the audience is the child or the parent. Ironically, the younger the intended audience the older the people you're going to be talking to.

Despite these problems there are still some things that can be done without too much expense and hassle.

Customer-created content

There are easy ways of adding children's voices to your content:

• If your OPAC includes the facility to publish readers' ratings and reviews, actively encourage children's reviews. You might need to do it for them; if so, an ethical solution would be to set up a dummy customer account specifically for posting them.If you have children's reading groups, encourage the groups to post their reviews, too.
• You'll probably already include links to writers' web sites with the rest of their works in your catalogue; why not also include links to appropriate fan sites?
• If your children's reading groups have their own web pages link to them from your site.
• Many OPACs have the facility to build saved lists and incorporate them into URLs to create canned searches. Canvas ideas for reading lists, "top tens" and the like and build them into links in your site. If you can present these as carousel galleries of books covers - yay!!!
• If you have good working relationships with schools and youth workers, get them involved, too.

Changing rooms

If you can't have child-centred pages on your council's web site, can you provide separate versions of your OPAC for children?

• The basic model would just be to have a version of the OPAC that's limited to the children's collections (this is where we're at in Rochdale at the moment).
• A modification of this would be to change the wording for this version's home page and search forms (which could probably do with simplifying anyway). You'll need to be pretty clear about which particular audience(s) you're addressing here. You might want to do a CBeebies/CBBC split.
• If you have a useful working relationship with your comms people and if your corporate brand is either flexible enough to deliver or allows permissible exclusions in particular circumstances, then you could do some interesting work on the stylesheets, etc. to make the look and feel more friendly. This isn't necessarily about using primary colours and Comic Sans (catalogue records look really horrible in Comic Sans, I've tried it). It's usually about: 
• Simplifying elements, or eliminating them altogether. Is the link to the corporate web site useful to a nine year-old?
• Adding pages specifically aimed at your audience. The obvious ones would be your help pages.
• Illustrating ideas and instructions with graphics.
• Perhaps even having its own character-based branding (like Bookstart Bear).

These are just a few potential quick-win options. Given time and resources there's a lot more that could be done but I think there's a danger of ignoring the basics in pursuit of the cutting edge and sexy.

Lessons Learned

It being the end of year and it being a time for reflection and review and that I thought I'd put down a few thoughts on a process that's sadly neglected by many library projects: Lessons Learned.

In my experience, too often the lesson learned is; "We seem to have managed that in the end, so it's OK to fly by the seats of our pants next time, too." This is an opportunity missed: experience is not what happens to you, it's what you do with it. If what you do with it is nothing then the experience is lost. So it's important to build the Lessons Learned process into any project.

The purpose of a Lessons Learned Document is to capture the experience accrued by the project in a formal document for use on similar future projects, including:

• Problems that occurred, how they were handled and how they may be avoided in the future.
• What went well with the project and why, so that other project managers may capitalize on this experience.

It is not the purpose of a Lessons Learned Document to apportion praise or blame.

This document should be used to support the continuous service improvement processes within the organisation.


Just to put my money where my mouth is, these are the recommendations from the lessons learned process from our project migrating from Dynix to Spydus:

1. A specification of operational functions is essential for the Statement of User Requirements. The more explicitly practical and measurable the more robust the selection process in procurement.
• Actively encourage staff input in the specification process to get ideas for the specification and buy-in for the project.
• Actively investigate other solutions and technologies so that you aren’t just doing a like-for-like replacement and limiting yourself to established business delivery models.


2. Before a procurement process that you own begins you need the following:
• What is the process? What are the critical paths?
• Who are the stakeholders — customer/ project/ procurement/ legal/ partners/ whoever
• Who is/are responsible for doing each step of the process?
• What information/ documentation is required for each step?
• When do you know each step has been completed?
• Has this all been agreed by all the stakeholders?


3. Agree a Project Initiation Document and work from it.
   • Make sure that you know who is doing what and in what order.
   • Make sure you know what isn’t to be done.


4. Work to the project:
   • Make sure that you’ve agreed who is doing what and in what order.
   • Make sure everyone knows what isn’t to be done.
   • Have clear lines of communication.
   • Get together regularly to review progress and, where necessary, revise action plans.
   • Allow at least three weeks between Subject Expert Training and Train the Trainers to allow options to be explored, modelled and tested for use (particularly with new functionality) adequately.
   • Train the Trainers is an opportunity to test the commissioning to date. Allow at least a week between Train the Trainers and the first batch of Cascade Training to test the safety of any changes.
   • Have cut-off points for commissioning changes:
     • No changes to codes and data structures after data migration.
     • Severely limit the number of system parameter changes after Train the Trainers.
     • Admit no changes to any part of the system (except in emergency) on the day you go live.

Make sure that the technical infrastructure requirements are included in the Statement of User Requirements and agreed with the supplier before commencing the installation.

The OPAC is an integral part of the system, not an add-on, so it needs to be treated as part of the whole.

• The training for the management of the OPAC needs to be included in the Subject Expert programme.
• Make sure that all the people having input to the commissioning of the OPAC understand its purpose and function.

Spending time cleaning up the data using familiar tools in the system you know saves a considerable amount of time, effort and problems with both the data migration and the operation of the new LMS.

Prepare for the MARC21 environment by making sure the existing catalogue data maps at least adequately and by making sure that there is sufficient MARC21 expertise within the organisation to verify that it does.

It’s useful and important to see how a reference site uses a process.

• It’s important to make sure that the ‘right’ experience of a site visit is realized: be clear about what the experience needs to be beforehand and proactively manage distractions.

Any library service that is not already used to MARC cataloguing should make sure well before the Subject Expert Training that:

• There is sufficient expertise for the catalogue data mapping process.
• Staff who will be using catalogue processes (including acquisition via EDI) need to understand at least the basics of the format.

New OPAC

Good news: we've got the TEST versions of OPAC and the resource discovery module, working and they look quite nice.

Bad news: we've had to postpone the training for the OPAC as we need to incorporate the change in the corporate branding that should be coming on stream this summer. Essentially, we'll be going live at the end of July with an OPAC pretty much out of the box. Perhaps the only "radical" novelty we'll be delivering at this stage is the range of subcatalogues we'll be presenting:

• The "vanilla" catalogue"
• Children's Library
• Local Studies
• The Co-operative Collection - very much an unsung resource, especially in this International Year of Co-operation
• The Maskew Collection - a special collection of English literature and philosophy funded by the bequest of a local lady

At the moment we're only doing this by imposing filters on the library catalogue, not doing anything in the way of additional information and canned searches. This is frustrating, but I guess unavoidable, but we'll just have to do as best as we can. I'm looking forward to getting the training as there's quite a lot of possibility lurking in these two customer interfaces, particularly Sorcer which has a lot of scope for creating personalised learning/reading environments.

Note to self: the library catalogue

Two principles to work to:

• A customer should be able to use the catalogue to get within six feet of the item they want on the shelves without staff mediation.


• Allowing the customer to find what they want is only half the job: the catalogue needs to persuade the customer to also want what they find.