Lens: a new way of finding things in the library

As some people know, I work at the University of Chicago Library. I've been working on a project for some time now--a new "library catalog" as it were, although since the new "catalog" includes things not normally in a catalog, some people with credentials don't want it called that.

It's cool, and more in tune with more modern searching techniques than the old catalog. I hope it encourages students and researchers to use the catalog more frequently.

The new catalog is called Lens, and you can see it in beta here. My involvement with the project is that I am the system administrator on the machine behind the URL. It's running on a very nice Sun Fire v40z running Windows 2003 Server 64-bit on eight-cores, with 16GB of RAM. We also added more disk space to it by setting up a SAN and connecting via Fibre Channel. All these things are like new toys to sysadmins like me.

The software itself is an application from a Dutch company called Medialab. They've been selling this software to lots and lots of libraries over the past few years, and now they're starting to sell it to big academic libraries, like us. We're not the first academic to use it; Oklahoma State has it up and running. But we do have a very large collection--some 5.3 million "things" come up when I ask Lens what we have (there are a lot more items in the library physically, since the catalog wouldn't count individual serials and such. Plus don't get me started about uncataloged items).

On the left side of the new catalog is a Flash* app that finds some associations with search terms you've entered. I thought this was flashy, no pun intended, and pointless, until I began discovering interesting items in our collection I never knew existed. This ranged from UC dissertations to non-technical books that I've got lined up to read (one never runs out of reading material). Once I find something interesting, I dump the record into our site-licensed Refworks for later retrieval.

Instead of scrolling through a long list of items, you can narrow your search by using the right-hand column to refine by a variety of methods like format, how old the item is, or by other means. You can also refine by the classification (aka the call number range) of the book: I'm usually quickly cutting off the chaff by refining by selecting Q (Science), for instance.

We also bought additional content to stick into the new catalog--things like book covers and album art are de rigeur in Amazon, and it can grab your interest or make known items quick to find in a list. We also bought audio CD song title listings, the table of contents of many books, and some summaries of books.

A neat little tool available is you can subscribe to an RSS feed for specific searches, so if something new comes along, you can discover it automatically. (Like say the acquisition or new publication of a particular author or subject). This RSS feed will give you new items of Bill Bryson, for example.

There are some issues with it. It indexes the Library's web site, but the results are messy and voluminous. If you search for a specific author, often anthologies or chapters in a book come up before titles actually fully authored by them. The "relevancy" or ranking of an item, especially when you are searching for authors, is currently in flux and for the moment they put a lot of extra author refinements in to compensate until the main rankings are improved. For instance, if you search for science fiction author James Blish, it will bring up anthologies of science fiction he has stories in first, and then some non-related items that have the word "establish" in them, before titles written by him. A simple author refine on the right side gets rid of that, but it won't be there once the relevancy engine gets tuned.

At some point in the near future, we might enable social tagging on the catalog, like LibraryThing, so people can enter their own tags to help sort the catalog, offer reviews, raves, and criticisms of items, and such. It's still up in the air.

*If you don't have Flash, I made sure that the developers included a simple text version of the word cloud. And, if the thing annoys you truly, and you don't wish to discover items you may not have thought about to look at, you can turn it off too.

End of the year non-review #4: copyright and the public domain

Edging closer to the mission of where I work:


Happy Public Domain Day!
We need serious copyright reform. What is the value of most of the works older than say fifty years?

Data that should be free, since it's governmentally produced and therefore in the public domain already:

Invaluable US government docs to be scanned and posted

Making a Brouhaha in the Blogosphere -- Peter Brantley
1.8 million pages of US federal case law to go online for free
Carl Malamud Takes on WestLaw

See an amazing amount of rescued video and data at: The Internet Archive

Libraries or Pirate Places?

Personal update

I haven't been posting lately. suffering from a bizarrely strong summer cold, plus work stuff ( I can finally say, after a long legal silence, that my workplace is going with Aquabrowser as the next generation library catalog, which I am administering the boxes it runs on).

An interesting tidbit showed up this week in the blog logs: Google has re-indexed its images again, bringing my violet image of the solar spectrum back to its rankings. Previous to March, it was the first hit for the term "blue-violet". For whatever reason (I believe some stupid google war site misappropriated the image), it disappeared then, dropping monthly hits to my blog by 3,000. The image is now #4; although the hit goes through the same stupid site. The direct link for the blue-violet image is this.

Online Geiger counter: off

The online Geiger counter is temporarily off while I deal with power issues in my office. I've also been thinking of taking it and a GPS on a tour around campus--there are a few places with exotic granites/other intrusives (like the Henry Moore sculpture not a few hundred feet away from my very desk) that have decent Uranium/Thorium concentrations.

Description of the counter

IR-block windows

I cut a window out of a piece of polycarbonate to replace the IR-block filter in the modified Canon S300. It's 1.0mm thick, and the infrared block filter was 2mm, so it didn't solve my focus issues. But it helped. I realized today all I need to do is cut another one out and 1+1=2. Sure it won't be optical cement-glued together, or anti-reflective coated, but who cares. I cut the polycarbonate (which is really the protective cover of a package of CD-Rs) with a dremel and ground the sides to fit.


The windows. The cyan one is the original.


This blurry photo is an example. I include it because of the delightful color variations from the mixed lighting. Fluorescents around the periphery and metal halide in the center. The carpet in the center is nearly black to the eye.

UPDATE: Gah. Adding two windows pushes the CCD back too far, resulting in out of focus images.