We are delighted to announce five recent additions to the XC Development Team: Randy Cook, Project Manager, and developers Péter Király, Tejaswi Haramurali, Eric Osisek, and Shreyansh Vakil. Visit our team page to learn more about the team!

We are still recruiting for two positions on the team that are listed here.

A colleague asked me how I justify doing qualitative work since surveys are faster, cheaper, and get you all the information you need. I thought a few words on this subject would be generally interesting, so here’s my thinking.

It really depends on what questions you want to ask. We use surveys, interviews, observations, and a whole bunch of other methods. When we construct a methodology for a particular project, we first figure out what we need to know and then select the methods that will get us that information.

For example, if we want to know what kind of hardware or software people are using, we use a survey. We did this for our XC project (and asked a lot of other questions besides) and got back some great information for making decisions about platforms and so on. (See http://www.extensiblecatalog.info/?page_id=62 for survey results.)

Surveys can be great but they are not always appropriate. They are very hard to construct; most people don’t realize how difficult it is to create a really good survey and I can tell you that I’ve seen lots of really bad ones. Also, surveys depend on people reporting things accurately to you. When you ask what kind of computer someone uses, it’s pretty easy for them to give you an accurate answer. But when you ask them how many hours a day they study (a really terrible question, btw) there is no way that you are going to get useful information. And if you want to know how people use their computers or how they do their research, there is simply no substitute for getting into their workspaces and getting them to show you their books, papers, computers, desks, and so on. Interviews may not be ideal (limited time, limited access, and many other significant limitations) but getting into people’s workspaces and having them show you things is a far better way to understand their work practices than sending out a survey.

There is no doubt that observation, interviewing, photography and video, and our other ethnographic and qualitative methods are much more expensive and time consuming than sending out a survey – there’s just no contest, no argument. But for our money, the qualitative work – when appropriate to the question – gets such amazing results that it’s worth it. And the results include both information about our faculty and students *as well as* a degree of participation and visceral learning on the part of our library staff that other methods simply do not allow.

Of course, I’m an anthropologist and qualitative research is my passion – and my bread and butter. So I may sound like a qualitative missionary. But it really boils down to figuring out what information you want and then picking the best (cheapest, fastest, most effective, most enlightening, and even most participatory) method of getting it. Sometimes that’s a survey. Sometimes it’s interviews. And sometimes it’s something else.

I’m pleased to announce that Emily Lynema has just been appointed to the XC Advisory Board for Phase 2 of the project.

Emily is a Systems Librarian for Digital Projects at North Carolina State University. She manages NCSU Libraries’ Endeca implementation, including current work toward a union catalog powered by Endeca for the 4 universities of the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN). She is also a member of the DLF ILS Discovery Interface Task Force, which is working toward an API to provide enhanced access to ILS data and functionality for external discovery applications. She was honored to be included in Library Journal’s Movers and Shakers for 2007.

Emily will assume the seat on the Advisory Board that had previously been filled by Andrew Pace, who has now taken a position at OCLC. We’re delighted to have Emily on board!

Jennifer

We’ve just posted a new fact sheet about the XC Project.

We’ve just added two new pages to the XC blog that will provide consistent links to recent presentations about XC and links to articles about XC.

View/listen to recent webcasts about XC on the Presentations page - two webcasts are now available!
Read what Eric Lease Morgan and Stanley Wilder have to say about XC on the Writings about XC page. Please let us know of other articles or blog postings about the XC Project that we can link to!

Jennifer

Please spread the word that the eXtensible Catalog project team is growing and looking for top notch candidates!  Our current open positions are listed on the Job Openings page and include a project manager, and two software developers.  We hope to hear from you!

During Phase 1 of XC, the XC Team had the opportunity to work with a group of five software engineering students at the Rochester Institute of Technology, who selected as their Senior Project the opportunity to develop an Access Control tool for XC that will facilitate the disambiguation of personal names across multiple metadata schemas. The tool developed by the RIT “Metacat” team (as they called themselves) ingests MARC bibliographic records and Dublin Core records, and compares personal names in both sets of records with MARC authority records. As we move into Phase 2, we will incorporate the tools developed by the RIT team into the first release of XC. Thanks to all of the students who participated, and to their advisor, Bob Bubacz!

The final report of the Metacat project is available here: http://docushare.lib.rochester.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-27362

RIT Senior Project team (left to right): Matthew Horoszowski, Rob Busack, Dean Rzonca, Ben Greenwood, Anthony Lyo

We are pleased to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded us a grant to support Phase 2 of the eXtensible Catalog project. The press release follows…

Libraries will soon be able to offer their patrons quicker and easier access to collections with use of new software being developed at the University of Rochester.

A $749,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the University’s River Campus Libraries will be used toward building and deploying the eXtensible Catalog (XC), a set of open-source software applications libraries can use to share their collections. The grant money will also be used to support broad adoption of the software by the library community. The grant and additional funding from the University and partner institutions makes up the $2.8 million needed for the project. The resulting system will allow libraries to simplify user access to all library resources, both digital and non-digital. This is the second grant awarded to the University by the Mellon Foundation for XC development.

Ronald F. Dow, the Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries, said the system will provide library patrons with a richer experience when accessing the libraries’ collections by offering them a variety of tools. Users will be able to navigate search results, and add user tags and reviews to documents, among other things. Dow said he is “very proud” of the library staff members who created the grant proposal.

“I am extremely pleased that the Mellon Foundation, by funding this proposal, has . . . awarded the library an opportunity to bring these ideas to fruition,” Dow said. The system will also enhance libraries’ management of their materials.

It will provide a platform for local development and experimentation that will ultimately allow libraries to share their collections through a variety of applications, such as Web sites, institutional repositories, and content management systems.

University of Rochester staff will build XC in partnership with the following institutions: Notre Dame University, CARLI (Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois), Rochester Institute of Technology, Oregon State University, the Georgia PINES Consortium, Cornell University, the University at Buffalo, Ohio State University, and Yale University. Each XC partner institution has committed staff time or monetary contributions toward the development of XC.

A second group of institutions will contribute to the project through the participation of its staff members in XC-user research, or by providing advisory support to the University’s development team. These institutions include the Library of Congress, OCLC, Inc., North Carolina State University, Darien (CT) Public Library, Ohio State University, and Yale University.

At the University of Rochester Dow is leading the project, along with David Lindahl, director of digital initiatives; Jennifer Bowen, director of catalog and metadata management; and Nancy Fried Foster, lead anthropologist for the libraries.

Jonathan Rochkind (rochkind@jhu.edu / http://bibwild.wordpress.com ) (IP: 128.220.205.186 ) posted a query a few days ago in response to Nancy’s “Recent Work on User Reseach” posting, but which is actually related to metadata. Here’s Jonathan’s original posting:

This is a very well written report of some encouraging work in an encouraging project, thanks.

I am a bit confused about one thing. Some of the language in the report, especially towards the end in the project assessment section, seems to imply that the XC project will be focused on the “front-end”, on “a Next Generation Discovery System.” However, the Phase 1 report indicates that during Phase 1, “metadata requirements” and issues were considered, even going so far as to create a software prototype for a multi-metadata-schema “authority tool”. This latter especially is not what we usually think of as a “front end” or part of a “next generation discovery system” (although of course our front-end discovery systems are reliant on and intimately connected to our backend metadata control processes!)

Has the XC project shied away from interesting in developing tools to address metadata control needs, instead focusing solely on the “front end”, with where the metadata is coming from and how it got there outside the purview of the project?

And here’s my response:

XC is indeed still intending to tackle the metadata issues associated with a next-generation discovery system. I can see that it may have looked like this has been pushed to the back burner with all of our recent reporting on user research, but this isn’t the case. I’ve just submitted a paper on the metadata requirements for XC (one of the outcomes of the first grant), which I hope will be published within the next six months. We’ll be sure to link to it when it is! Over the next couple of months we’ll be developing an application profile for XC and the system requirements for XC’s metadata services hub, so we’ll be sure to post updates on this work and issues as we encounter them, as I’m sure that we will.

Jennifer Bowen

The team at the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries continues to conduct research on undergrads, grad students, and faculty members. We look at their academic work practices, how those practices fit into their lives, and how libraries - as physical sites and as collections of physical and electronic resources- fit into those practices.

We have recently published a book on one of these ongoing studies, Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester. This book is available for purchase or as a free .pdf.

Scott Carlson of The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote an article this past August on the Undergraduate Research Project. It provides a good overview of how user research fits into the library.