First, I’m going to miss My (Current) Place Of Work. They are great folks and when I said I was leaving they expressed great sorrow and sent some VERY funny pictures.

But I had an offer I couldn’t refuse — well, I could have refused, but then I’d be kicking myself for the rest of my life, and what fun would THAT be? (Like this cupcake I ate in New York City last December. Sure, diets, whatever… but I’m still glad I ate the cupcake.)

As of June 23 (just in time for ALA!), I’m the Community Librarian at Equinox, the support and development company for Evergreen, the premier, industrial-strength open-source integrated library system software.

What, you ask, is a Community Librarian? It’s a chief blogger, presenter, evangelist, community liaison, birds-of-a-feather organizer, strategist, branding specialist, user-experience person, project management advisor, and whatever else happens to need doing. (I wrote the job description, and I think that hits the high notes.)

After sixteen years in LibraryLand (more, if you count college and high-school jobs), I want to be working on the future of libraries. It’s time. For nearly two decades I’ve watched libraries struggle with closed legacy software, and the advantages of open source — particularly in a highly-scalable system — are obvious to me.

Making the advantages of open source obvious to YOU will be part of my job.

Where will I work?

I don’t like to say “from home” — that sounds too parked-in-a-chair — I think a better term is “telework,” because first, our home will probably change sometime in the next year, and second, the point is that I’ll be wherever Evergreen and Equinox need my voice and presence. I will make trips throughout Georgia and to the Norcross offices of Equinox (I’m starting to like Atlanta — it’s an interesting city) and far, far beyond.

I’m sad to leave MPOW… learned a lot, great people; definitely recommend MPOW to anyone interested — but I’m excited about the future. (I hope that was a nice-enough farewell to my buddies at MPOW. I’m hoping they give me a green Prius as a going-away present… though that means I better finish that Shibboleth report Greg is waiting for..!)

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• “The pilot group for the Michigan Evergreen project will be finalized by February 1.” Michigan Evergreen is “an open source ILS project of the Michigan Library Consortium and the Grand Rapids Public Library.”
• Indiana State Library is launching an investigation into using Evergreen statewide.
• British Columbia is bringing up another Evergreen library system in early February: Powell  River. BC also plans to bring up at least a dozen library systems  in 2008 on their Evergreen instance. Equinox will be providing support and migration services.
• Evergreen is currently in use by Georgia Library PINES, a consortium of 270 public libraries. Additionally, libraries in British Columbia have committed to migrating to Evergreen, and Prince Rupert Library and Fort Nelson Public Library have already put Evergreen into production. Laurentian University is also committed to Evergreen and is collaborating with GPLS, British Columbia, McMaster University, and the University of Windsor on an Acquisitions/Serials module. Also, Kent County Public Library is in line to become the first Evergreen-powered library in Maryland, and the Michigan Library Consortium and Grand Rapids Public Library are working together to develop a shared library system using Evergreen. [This last para shamelessly stolen from the Evergreen about page]

This is not to say that Koha doesn’t give me hope — LibLime just signed WALDO, a consortium of small academics in Westchester County — but from the perspective of a state where the catalogs are as big as heffalumps, I’m looking for hope on a larger scale.

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A year ago in Techsource I wrote a series about the problems with OPACs, and in the course of it wrote about relevance ranking. I said, quite accurately, that TF/IDF was a technology used for relevance ranking, and if I say so myself, I explained TF/IDF pretty darn well:

TF, for term frequency, measures the importance of the term in the item you’re retrieving, whether you’re searching a full-text book in Google or a catalog record. The more the term million shows up in the document—think of a catalog record for the book Million Little Pieces—the more important the term million is to the document.

IDF, for inverse document frequency, measures the importance of the word in the database you’re searching. The fewer times the term million shows up in the entire database, the more important, or unique, it is.

However, if I could revisit that article today, I would emphasize that “ranking,” done well in the Most Moderne Fashion, is a complex soup dependent on far more than TF/IDF, and I would include the opinions of people who believe — in some cases, based on real-world testing — that TF/IDF doesn’t work that well for ILS record sets, due in part to the inherent nature of citation records, which unlike full text are…hmmm… I am not sure how to put it, but citation records aren’t mini-representations of full text; they are a unique form of data. It can be dismaying to turn on relevance ranking in an ILS and discover that your results are close to nonsense — though it’s worth asking how much more nonsensical than OPACs that order items “last in first out.”

(At My Former Place Of Work Minus One, we tested a fancy search engine that had this really really kewl method for producing dynamic facets… why is it when vendors say “dynamic,” I start to twitch? Anyway, we turned it on and had to laugh. The kewl technology was based on word pairings that made some sense in full text, but for a citation index created nonsensical facets from phrases such as “includes bibliography.”)

Furthermore, record sets are not consistent within themselves. Cataloging practices change over time; practices even differ among catalogers or between formats. (Oh oh… did I just reveal a little secret?)

However, given that we don’t have full-text for records in most cases (though yes, I do think it would be great if we had that content to leverage), and given that TF/IDF is a useful technology, I would hazard — a good word in this case, since I don’t have any way to prove this — that some of the weaknesses of TF/IDF and ILS record sets could be at least partially remediated if record sets were broken up (or perhaps, marked up) along these lines of difference.

Most current-generation search engines (the Siderean/FAST/Endeca/i411/Dieselpoint set, to name five similar products; and I suspect Aquabrowser belongs here as well) can — unless I am greatly mistaken– provide a variety of ranking optimization. That’s a huge plus if you’re streaming together radically different indices. So an ILS record set could be broken up (not necessarily literally) along chronological and format lines, and each section indexed for its optimal needs, and then reassembled within the index. That, plus including other ranking methods — such as popularity — could go a long way. (I can imagine that it would be possible to do some processing on the fly, but that sounds expensive CPU-wise. There’s a reason we all hate federated search…)

(Speaking of popularity… a little caution, also based on experience: if you’re incorporating a “popularity” function in your OPAC, and you’re basing it on circulation… and you have a large e-book collection… see where I’m going? E-books don’t circ, so they don’t even get included in that metric. You may want to change that label to “most checked out,” change its value to represent “most browsed,” or skip it entirely.)

Of course, it would help if we didn’t have something quite as odd as a “record” to contend with… how slavish to convention, that a Thing has a Record… but that’s a whole ‘nother line of thought I have pondered since working with record sets a year or so ago.

Oh, and if you’re looking at Google Appliance for improving search functionality in your catalog… why? Google’s approach is almost vehemently anti-metadatical (is it redundant to say “that’s a new neologism?”); they worship at the cult of full text. Library data may be expensive to produce and annoying to work with,  but you might as well look at tools that leverage all that structure.

Gee, that was fun to write! Geek out. I may move on to “why SRW depresses me…”

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As Dorothea over at Caveat Lector notes, the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the post-Deweyfication of the Perry Branch at the Maricopa County Library District was spot-on. I always feel a little weird about praising an article that quotes me… “My name is Karen, and I approve this message.” Jessamyn is so better about this… I know none of you think of me as shy, but I need to learn from her.

My Techsource post writes about two parallel innovations: the Perry project, and using bookstore headings (BISAC) in an online catalog at the Phoenix Public Library. (I started to write “BISAC in an OPAC,” then thought, get thee away, acronyms!). I find it a reflection of the feudal nature of libraries that two systems in the same county could be working in parallel on eerily similar projects and not know it.

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