LITA Nashville -- Concurrent Session 3

Improving Library Services with AJAX and RSS Feed
Hongbin Liu, Yale University

I sat next to Genny while she wrote a live blog post of this session for LITA. Mostly, this was a Web 2.0 awareness session. And, in particular, awareness of AJAX and what a site looks like that uses it.

Hongbin Liu showed us Google/IG, the home page personalization service launched in May 2005. I think I managed to miss it when it first came out but it appears to be an AJAX version of MyYahoo. Yale has built a MyLibrary site that works like Google/IG rather than the older library portals, which were always underutilized. He admitted, when asked, that Yale is not going ahead with this project. The audience seemed to agree that it probably makes more sense for libraries to teach their users about services like Google/IG and then make sure that our content is reachable through that.

He wasn’t able to get LCSH Live from OCLC to work live, but apparently it works like Google Suggest, where when you are typing in a search term, the software suggests possibilities, other words that begin with the same letters as the ones you’ve typed. This is an AJAX application.

Written tonight: I just tried LCSH Live and it's pretty cool, getting deeper into a subject the more I type. L gets me a bunch of topics that begin with l--and I guess it's giving me the ones with the most items in it. So I see "large type" and "literature" in the top ten results--not just an alphabetic sort. Also, when I type in a subject like "moonshining" it gives me the item "Distilling, illicit"--the correct subject heading. Nice. Clicking through on links gets you authority records, which would be pretty scary to a patron, but it's a nice tool for figuring out the correct subject heading.

Labels: conferences, reviews

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