Library clips

Rollyo is a basic tool that lets you roll your own mini search engine made up of a maximum of 25 sites…the results are powered by Yahoo!.

This tool is going to hit the roof, I can see Yahoo! buying this company in a snap
…this is going to be loved by all, just the sound of making your own topic search engine is exciting.
I can see not just personal applications, but for education, news, enterprise, government, for anyone who searches the same regular sites

…see a great explanation at the SEW blog.

Ever since Gigablast had a go at this idea I forgot about it, now in the web 2.0 environment this type of tool seems so much better…add more user functionality, sharing, presentation and people want to know what it’s about. I think if most new web tools are able to add a community feel to them, they’ll have much more take up, as the web 2.0 folks are all about read/write/share/intergrate/manipulate, etc…

I once thought Furl was the answer but this only searches full-text of web pages, not the whole site.

Anyway as mentioned Gigablast allows a user to build a mini search engine from up to 200 sites (actually now it is 500), and offers a search box to put on your blog or website, and the search mechanism is powered by Gigablast…that’s about it.

They also have a similar tool, for site searching one URL, just like Google’s sitesearch box
…you can do this with Rollyo anyway by only including one URL in a Searchroll.

As the SEW blog mentioned you could get the same functionality of doing a meta site search by using the “site”, and “|” operator to separate sites in Google…but how cumbersome is this, Rollyo has made a web 2.0 application around this simple notion of searching several sites in one go.

Here’s how it works

From the home page click the “Explore Searchrolls” link

In the body you can see a summary of links to search rolls sorted in different ways

Along the side are some featured Searchroll boxes

…if you click on the up/down arrow it displays the URL’s included in that Searchroll

…in one click you can also add that search roll to your account

…you can click on the owner to see their account

You can also search for Searchrolls (not sure what fields this searches, as some results come up that are not in the title or url, maybe it searches for tags as well - these are applied when you make a Searchroll)

Here is a look at my account.

Here you can see:

- my details
- manage feature
- my list of Searchrolls I have made
- my list of Searchrolls I have saved (save your own, or discover other search rolls to save)
- my recent searches
- a showcase of some Searchrolls

Once you have added a few Searchrolls to your account, you can go to the search box on the home page (or any page) and choose one of your added Searchrolls from a drop-down menu, you can also just choose to search the web (Yahoo!)

So let’s search a Searchroll, here’s a search for the term “folksonomy” in one of mine called Library clips - Blogroll (my favourite 25 blogs)

Above the line is the latest Searchroll News (what is this, maybe it’s from Yahoo! News)

Below the line are the results from my search.

You can also limit the search to one of the sites in your Searchroll, by just clicking on the source, here I’ve limited my “folksonomy” search to just the Research Buzz URL.

More

Able to use Yahoo! search syntax such as intitle:searchterm

Email form to share a Searchroll

Private/Public Searchrolls

Expand your results to the whole web (Yahoo!)

Lots of tools coming soon, like putting a search box on your site

See the about page or FAQ for more.

Keep up-to-date with their blog, coming soon.

Wishlist

It just became beta today, but I’ll slog them with some features I’d like to see:

- What about a Rollyo toolbar so you can access your favourite mini-search engines from your browser

- Searching just within a sub-domain
(this way you could limit the search to just within a blog category…or even limit the search to a section of Google News)

- At the moment you can only explore items from the explore page, but when you create your own Searchroll you choose a system based category, and can apply multiple user-defined tags
…I guess that means that this will soon be a folksonomy like del.icio.us.

Now if you can apply tags to a Searchroll for findability, once you add this to your account will you be able to give it your own tags.

- Option of adding an RSS URL, but then again what for, as searching in the RSS version of a site might not search the whole sight, these are the limitations of RSS searching.
Although this could extend the number of sources as you could splice several feeds into one mega-feed and that would be counted as one of the 25 sources.

- It would be easier to bulk load some URL’s, kind of OPML style

- Once you do a search within a Searchroll, you can limit that search to only one site, it would be good if you could check multiple sites to limit your search (at the moment it’s one or all)

Kind of a related post:
Syndicated searching: A9 OpenSearch

The previous post focused on Internal Library blogs…a section on Reference Archive blogs and Reference Query blogs seems to be covered by an excellent article I referenced in the last post (this article makes more sense to me than it did a couple of years ago)

Lyceum: A Blogsphere for Library Reference illustrates how a localised blogosphere can be a great tool in library reference services…from the reference transaction, seeking an answer, referrals, to creating a reference knowledge base.

Automated Classification Indexing

Firstly all blog posts within this localised blogosphere are parsed and automatically classified.
This is the future of relieving RSS overload and at the same time subscribing to only the content you want to read, these types of automatic indexing are popular in enterprise EDMS’s and are increasingly becoming useful in organising content in the blogosphere (an alternative is human indexing, but how many blog posts can you classify in a day, and that old taxonomy vs. folksonomy issue arises)…so a fair deal is getting a computer to do the work.
For other purposes you can splice and filter any RSS feed you like with a number of tools on the market.

From the article:

“Lyceum’s architecture allows blogosphere actors to subscribe to a large number of streams, receiving posts that fit only their relevance criteria”

Some examples of this are K-Collector, which transports topics along with the content in the RSS feed, but if there is no topic (category) assigned to the blog post, it will create one on the fly.

Then there is TagCloud which is similar; it doesn’t exactly generate automatic classification of blog posts but what it does is generate computer generated hot key words, kind of like evolving/changing topics based on current content.
So the topics may be there one day, but gone the next…so this is similar but each post isn’t annotated and filed within a topic from a topic set, also this is just for browsing, you can’t subscribe to the RSS of a hot keyword as there aren’t any, and if there were, you may not get regular content as the keyword may disappear, then reappear in the future (volatile nature of the hot keywords).

Another really clever piece of process Newsmastering I have seen is Edu_RSS…check out the Topics page for RSS aggregation and filtering.
It gathers close to a hundred feeds and then classifies each post into a topic, this way you are reading an RSS Topic Stream (reading only the stuff you are interested in according to the automated indexing system).

What I want to know is how does this automated indexing of posts into topics work?
Is it accurate?
How is it different than splicing all these feeds into one feed and filtering by a keyword (topic)?

Reference Query blog

If the patron uses a blog to post a question, all reference librarians can read that question in their RSS reader, and help with an answer, as they call it a “reference sphere”…discussion can take part in the comments.
Not only is this discussion preserved, but it provides more than the question and answer, it includes the whole trail, each step taken to get to that answer (mistakes included).

Reference Archive blog

The reference question/answer is archived and organised in a category; it can act as an annotation for a resource or be an information resource itself…in any means it helps repetitive tasks, as this type of question or similar may of been asked before, if a quicker answer is possible all the better, and a few added tips may be suggested.

Running Statistics

Since the information is in a database many measures can be queried, such as:

“…not only frequently-asked questions, but frequent topics, frequent links, and frequent views, and all of this can be further organised by time or any number of other criteria.”

Referral

Since questions can be posted by the patron and viewed by all reference librarians who subscribe to the blog, referrals have the chance of being kept to a minimum as the question has a better of chance of being answered as it is exposed to more people, and the patron won’t need to be directed to another service (customer service is being served, we don’t won’t to discourage the patron, and let them go empty handed to start the whole process again somewhere else).

This type of system is great in the academic sector, where each subject librarian, or even lecturers can offer reference assistance (in a asynchronous way) from behind the scenes at their desk, or even from home.

Conclusion

The important measure is to remember who is supplying the answers, if non-library staff are subscribed to the Reference Query blog, are their answers of the benchmarked quality.

So if a patron posts a question, whoever is first can answer the question, hopefully there would be someone on duty anyway, but if others are online they could add their expertise, why not?

What if the librarian is asked a reference question face to face with a patron and the reference librarian needs others to help with an answer…there needs to be a blog in Lyceum where the reference librarian themselves can post a query, maybe this can be on the same blog the patron posts questions.

It seems that the Lyceum is an enhanced multi-user blog system such as Community Server, where the content of each blog is re-syndicated onto a master blog, subscribing to this RSS feed, acts like a spliced feeds of all the blogs in the system.

If staff already have their own blogs using various software, it’s not too late, you don’t need to start again with a multi-user blog system, you can just present the contents from various blogs into a Public RSS Aggregator, and subscribe to that mega-feed.

The difference with Lyceum is that it is not only built for timely posts, but it archives all content so it is a type of CMS, and it organises posts into intelligent topic streams.

Some related posts:

Remixable Web: Public RSS Aggregator
Blog-based folksonomy

Task Blog

In a job where people are clocking on/off it is important for the person leaving for the day to inform the person about to start, of the days proceedings (things done, things need doing, etc…)

Usually if this isn’t done face to face, you can use a notebook, to leave notes or instructions for the next person taking over the shift…in a library setting this type of communication is paramount for the circulation or reference desk.

Instead of using a notebook, how about using a blog, a simple blog will do (don’t really need categories).
When you start your shift just check the blog for instructions of what’s needs to be done.
When you complete a task, just edit the post by using the strikethrough font feature to cross it as done, just like you do on paper when a task is done.

Usually when the notebook is finished you throw it away (some pages are probably torn out, anyway)…but with a blog the content is archived by date and can be searched.

Also you don’t have to go to the blog to read content, you can read it in your RSS Reader
…this is handy if your blog is behind a firewall as you could read the authenticated (private) feed version, otherwise you could log-in to your work remotely and view the blog.
Either way it is great that you can read from home what’s to be done before you go to work (time to prepare yourself for your work shift).

Are people using this type of Internal blog?

Is it an effective way of communicating and preserving past tasks?

Reference Archive blog (knowledge base) and the Reference Query blog

This brings me to another thought…using a blog for reference questions.

There would be various ways reference desks collect reference questions to store in a knowledge base
…that way, if the reference librarian is asked a question, they can check in their knowledge base first to see if the question, or a similar question, has been asked previously. (This is one of the purposes of codifying information, to avoid wasting time with duplicate/repetitive situations…then there is the issue of making this information intuitively retrievable).

Now I’m not sure if the blog format is suited to this, as all you are really doing is archiving/indexing reference questions/answers (it’s not date pertinent).

The blog format may be more suited to the reference librarian posting a request to see if anyone can help answer a hard question…subscribers (other librarians from your extended team/branch) could be notified of the post in their RSS reader and respond in the comments of that post (this would be the Reference Query blog).

Then once the request has been fulfilled, that question/answer can be added to the knowledge base (this would be the Reference Archive blog).

NOTE: There could also be a blog for patrons/clients to submit a reference query, they fill out a form and the question is duplicated into a blog.

What type of system would the knowledge base be, I’m sure there are heaps, and MS Access is probably popular for this type of thing…I was thinking maybe a localised folksonomy.

Although, the user space wouldn’t matter as much, as everyone could login as the same person…ie, it wouldn’t be used so much as a space to share ideas but more for just recording information…used more for the fact that you can write a brief post, include a link, give it a title and apply a user-defined subject tag

…this is a very simple and informal process (people are more inclined to participate as it is more like blogging, which is fun, and not just data entry).

Then when querying the folksonomy (knowledge base) just browse the tag cloud or search full-text.

A note based folksonomy, like TagFacts, would suit this rather than a bookmark based folksonomy…see more.

A wiki wouldn’t really suit this type of information, as it needs to be searched/browsed like a database, I think a wiki is more appropriate for published list, or documentation (and of course the collaboration activity in the development of these pages).

At the same time, a folksonomy really doesn’t have to be used, you can record this same information in a blog, and incorporate a tag cloud, instead of using the default categories…this is probably much simpler and a more suited tool for the job.

Also some blogging tools are starting to include fielded data entry, such as StructuredBlogging and dataBlogging.

This adds value, as besides just a tag or a category, you could also search by other fields.

General Internal Blog

There is also the use of a blog for general internal communication and current awareness; maybe a communal blog, or a multi-user blog system (everyone has a system blog, where the content is aggregated [re-syndicated] into a master blog), or if people use their own blogs these can be aggregated into a Public RSS Aggregator)…also a note folksonomy mentioned above would also suit this type of communication much more.

General External Blog

Lastly there are library blogs that communicate with students, staff, or the community…these blogs are used as current awareness, what’s new, current status of library operations, PR, training, communication/sharing, etc…

Personal Blogs

Lets not forget librarians that blog, that’s me!
(Blogging about LIS, or whatever else)

continue…

Some related content:

Ten Guidelines for Developing Your Internal Blog
Blogs for Internal Communication
internal library communication
Blogging and Internal Communications
Lyceum: A Blogsphere for Library Reference
Creating an Internal Content Management System
Brushtail
oss4lib
Open Source Software and Libraries Bibliography