Spotted in the Creative Arts Building at Huddersfield Uni

I’m on the train home from Mashed Library 2009 just now. It’s been an excellent day, with huge thanks due to Dave Pattern and everyone else involved in organising it. As someone said, it was the most organised unconference ever – properly organised chaos!

The event for me started yesterday evening, as I decided to avoid a 4.30am start by travelling up the day before and staying locally (I can recommend the Cambridge Lodge – very friendly staff and excellent fried breakfast!). A trip to a noodle bar and several local drinking establishments had been organised, which was very enjoyable both because of the delicious food and drink and the chance it gave to meet people informally before the event. This really helped me get over my usual introversion and get chatting, which helped me off to a good start the next day.

First session I attended was Dave Pattern on library usage data and Iman Moradi on gaming and libraries. I failed to take notes in any sessions except on Twitter, so here’s scrappy recollections:

• Uni library stats show 20-25% of keyword searches end with 0 results. Resulting page is often a dead end – adding spellcheck etc will give a route out.
• Huddersfield has done all sorts of wonderful things with their usage data – ‘people who borrowed x, also borrowed…’, general suggestions, and increasingly course-specific stuff. I was particularly taken with the way they can use course-based usage stats to create course-specific new items lists!
• Visual features prove very popular (with stats to prove it) so finding ways to include book covers etc is a good idea. I wish sheet music covers didn’t all look so similar! AV material has more promise, but I’m imagining getting matches without ISBNs is slightly nightmarish.
• Dave has a vision of the library website in 2012 – modular, flexible, with services that can be pulled out into students’ website of choice. Also pulling in non-catalogue links and resources, e.g. BBC news feeds and journal articles chosen with knowledge of student’s course and interests.
• Iman had gorgeously designed slides, as you’d expect – he lectures in design iirc, as well as being a library fan! He reminded us of the user perspective, that finding stuff is complex and the more we can smooth that along the better. Serendipity can serve a purpose too, e.g. Huddersfield Town Library did a serendipitous display of novels by colour, which looked pretty and encouraged browsing.
• He also pointed out possible similarities between library use and gaming (sorry Iman, I don’t play World of Warcraft, I’m too busy on my DS). He pointed out a library borrowing history is a bit like a game achievements list – there can be bragging rights on reading certain books. Dave touched on this gaming idea too with the notion of karma points earned by helping other students, redeemable for free printing etc.

Second up was Richard Wallis on Talis’ open source Juice Project. Its aim is to make it easy to enhance OPACs without duplication of effort, or as Richard said ‘slap some mash on your OPAC’ (wonder how he got that authentic mash-on-plate sound effect?). This is achieved by the writing of cross-OPAC extensions to e.g. add Google Book API features, look up a title in Worldcat (and display it in an in-page lightbox if so desired), plus the writing of a vendor-specific ‘metadef’ which defines where the ISBN etc are located on the page. If these are in place, all your friendly OPAC sysadmin has to do is write a little script to tell Juice where to put the extra content on the page, add a few lines of code to the OPAC source page and voila! This is something I’m hoping to get time to play with soon, although I’ll need to learn some Javascript and hope someone writes a metadef for SirsiDynix elibrary, else I’ll need to learn a lot of Javascript. Hoping some more real-world examples will start appearing soon too.

Philosophically I think the Juice Project has it spot on – it’s mad that so many OPAC administrators spend time coding enhancements which then work on their OPAC and theirs alone. Sharing code is definitely the way forward, and allows lesser-resource institutions with little development time to participate. One potential downside is accessibility – always an issue with Javascript, which is why it’s advised Juice is only used to add extra value to a service rather than critical functionality.

My final morning session was Tony Hirst’s Yahoo Pipes mashalong. I’d attended his Pipes presentation at last year’s inaugural Mashed Library event and been left in awe at what was possible, but not quite sure what to do with it. Sadly this time round Tony was beset with technical problems which cut his mashalong tragically short; on the plus side he’s since done a detailed and interesting blog post mashalong as an ‘apology’ (not necessary!) which I’ll be working through myself at some point. Despite the technical troubles this session was worth attending just for Tony’s brilliantly succinct explanation of JSON, which I’ve been baffled by until now – basically it’s a Javascript representation of an RSS feed which can be used to pull a feed’s contents into any webpage. Now I understand why I might want JSON output!

I’ll leave it here for now as my train’s nearly reached London. Another post (hopefully a briefer one) on the afternoon’s proceedings is coming soon…

Mashupcookbook by Dave Pattern

My employer’s agreed to fund my attendance at the Mashed Library UK 2009 unconference in Huddersfield next month, which I’m very grateful for and really looking forward to after the successful inaugural event in London last year.

I think it may be the most well-organised event I’ve ever encountered – Dave Pattern and his colleagues have been gathering tons of information, ranging from asking attendees about their interests and expertise to gauging opinions on the lunchtime pizza options! As part of the build-up Dave’s been carrying out blog chats with various attendees, and today was my turn (hence my hasty blog update!).

Over the next few weeks I’ll consider what sort of things I’d like to explore on the day and perhaps even come up with some fresh ideas. I’d like to make more progress with our OPAC - API work at Christmas enabled auto-plural searching and it now uses a custom synonym list (so finally searches for cello and violoncello give the same results!). I think spell-checking would be a nice thing to add soon, and I saw someone on the Mashed Library forum discussing this so maybe I’ll pick up some tips. Also very intrigued by the Juice Project…

• Save paper & ink printing only what you want « PrintWhatYouLike.com

  Allows you to reformat any web page to make it more suitable for printing. Of course every site should have its own print stylesheet instead…

  tags: green, printing, apps, work

• aRKive: Free stock photographs

  Blog post listing places to find free stock photos for use in educational materials etc.

  tags: free, photos, stock, work

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Kirkendall Public Library catalogue

  Good example of an online catalogue using the next version of my library’s catalogue software (e-library vs iLink for those interested). One to refer to when setting ours up!

  tags: work, opac, rss, sirsidynix, systems

• UKOLN | Cultural Heritage Events: CILIP Council Meeting: April 2009

  A really interesting presentation on the risks and opportunities of Library 2.0 developments with examples of evaluative frameworks. Written for a meeting where CILIP is considering use of web 2.0 resources.

  tags: library2.0, cilip2.0, videos, presentations, work

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• YouTube – Spotify: Review – Free Legal Music

  Short intro to Spotify. May use this in user training as work PCs don’t have Spotify installed.

  tags: spotify, video, usered, work, tutorials

• Learn Perl

  Lists resources for learning Perl, including free e-books, recommended published books, mailing lists etc.

  tags: work, programming, perl, learning

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• meetona – the free online meeting maker

  Another free web app for trying to organise a meeting. Seems pretty flexible as it allows free-text time entry.

  tags: work, scheduling, usered, calendar

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Computers in Libraries

  Computers in Libraries journal readable online. Not very well laid out and ads aplenty, but free!

  tags: reading, research, work, journals, systems

• BBC – Radio Labs – Designing for your least able user

  Great (and very long) blog post on web design and SEO. Points out you should treat search bots as your ‘least able user’, i.e. if you’re doing accessibility right, search bots should like your site too.

  tags: work, webdesign, SEO

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Command-line Fu < The best UNIX commands on the web

  Place to put regularly used command-line commands (rather than keeping them in a document) and learn useful commands from others. This page sorted by popularity.

  tags: unix, commands, work

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Many Eyes – Annotated

  Free online data visualisation with tons of options. Looks very cool but I haven’t thought of anything to do with it yet!

  tags: data, visualisation, work, graphics, interactive

• Lovely Charts | Free online diagramming application

  Online app for creating pretty flowcharts, diagrams etc. Free but can only save one chart for later editing at a time.

  tags: work, free, online, flowcharts, apps

• >SplashURL

  Handy for live demos – enter a URL and this will splash a shortened version across the screen so people watching can enter it on their computers. May figure out a user education function for it…

  tags: work, usered, presentations, demos, urls

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I’ve been playing with Spotify for a while now, mostly using it to listen to music at home when I wanted to listen to a song I didn’t own. Recently, thanks to Owen Stephens (via Twitter), I found out that the service also contains a substantial collection of classical music and so could be of use academically to students at my conservatoire.

Spotify generally

Spotify is a service which allows you to listen to music for free online through its application which you have to download and install (available for Windows, Mac and Linux via Wine). Its advantage over services like Last.fm radio is that you can search for specific tracks, and as long as they’re licensed to the service you can listen to them in full. It’s funded by advertising, so you’ll occasionally get ads appearing on the app or radio-style audio ads between tracks – the latter are a bit annoying if you’re in the middle of an album or something atmospheric, but a price worth paying in my opinion.

At the time of writing anyone in the UK can sign up for a free account, but people elsewhere must be invited by current users in order to control growth of demand. This may start again in the UK if demand grows too quickly, so beware!

My review of Spotify

The below is all my personal opinion after trying out the app for a little while. I’ve split it into sections to hopefully aid readability.

Coverage

Classical coverage is decent but not comprehensive, gauged by searching for upcoming performance pieces at my college. There’s a fair smattering of ‘big name’ performers thanks to EMI Classics, and coverage is likely to improve with yesterday’s announcement of a deal with Naxos (depending what figures in that press release you use, that could be 10-25% of Naxos Music Library available free on Spotify!). Something that attracts me is the availability of musical theatre recordings which is a weak point in all our subscription resources. There also appears to be decent jazz coverage – though this by no means my specialist subject, a few cursory searches threw up plenty of results.

Metadata (aka what librarians care about)

The metadata for classical music sucks. The ‘artist’ can either be the performer (one or more of conductor, ensemble, soloist etc) or the composer. If the composer isn’t the artist, they end up shoved somewhere in the track or album title. Occasionally there’s no indication who the performer is at all! As a commenter on the Spotify blog said, they should be consistent – a good start would be to follow the MusicBrainz Classical Style Guide. This is the end result of shoehorning classical music into an album-based system, when the work rather than the album or song is the key organising concept in classical music. The new iteration of the Classical Music Library is another example of this, and one I may come back to another day.

Usability

Thankfully the search function on Spotify works very well, so you can forgive some of the metadata messiness as you do tend to find what you want in the end. Browsing ability is impaired by inconsistency, but works very well for pop, jazz etc – click on an artist name to see everything available by them; click an album name to see the full track listing plus reviews from Allmusic.com; use advanced search features if you want to. Double-click a song title to listen, drag it to your play queue to enqueue it or a playlist name to add it there. All pretty intuitive.

Technical

Sound quality is fine – not CD quality but adequate and comparable with paid services like Naxos Music Library and Classical Music Library. I think there’s a bit of compression/limiting kicking in on pieces with a large dynamic range but not serious enough to damage enjoyment. Apparently bandwidth is around 64Kb/s which shouldn’t cause anyone on broadband/institution connections much trouble.

Correction: Spotify’s FAQ says: “We use the Ogg Vorbis q5 codec which streams at approximately 160kb/s.” so it’s a much higher bitrate than I’d heard elsewhere (possibly on a Guardian podcast, not sure). I have to say I didn’t think it sounded *that* good but the higher figure does make sense. I still hope our institutional connection could cope with many users concurrently.

The biggest downside is requiring the application to be installed – the one thing stopping me rolling it out immediately across the student computers in the library.

Conclusions

Give it a go! I’m going to discuss with my boss whether we should be asking IT to install the app on all the library PCs – my only concern at the moment is whether the app will be able to update itself afterwards, because I’ve noticed it seems to have quite frequent update requirements. There’s a lot I’ve not touched on here with the social side of Spotify – sharing links to tracks and playlists using spotify: URLs or third-party apps like Mixifier – as I’ve tried to focus on why libraries should be interested in Spotify now, and need to think a bit more about this side of things. Have a play, see what you think, and let me know if you agree/disagree with my comments!