TL Under Construction

Things have been quiet in blog-land because I’m in the midst of two essays both due on the same day!! I’ve completed one ETL 505 – Descriptive Cataloguing (I think) and will give it a last re-read and edit on Friday then shove it out the door.

ETL 501 is bubbling along – maybe at the 3/4 mark but will definitely need some editing as I’ve blown out the word count on the second part of the assignment.

But in the real world of  this TL and her school library there is even more exciting news! The fence has gone up around the old multi-purpose room which means the renovations are about to begin. Our school opted to have the BER grant put into the building of a new multi-purpose room and the capital works grant applied to the old multi-purpose room to make-over into the library.  I haven’t seen the final plans for the renovation yet — something that’s got me a little curious — and a little nervous, I’ll admit.

Here are the before photos. I’ll try to keep a record running here of the journey.

Probably one of my favourite search engines for students right now is Study Search.

Study Search explains itself as:

[using] the power of Google’s search engine combined with a growing database of educational websites. When a search is done, Google checks our database and gives those sites priority in the search results. The student is still doing a full Google search but the results are tuned to display sites that are more relevant.

The ‘About ‘ page goes on to explain that sites within their database are compiled from suggestions by teachers, Teacher-Librarians and site volunteers. As a student of ETL 501 currently studying educational website criteria and evaluation of websites, I was interested to know if the suggestions sent in were evaluated in any way. The FAQs mention only that –  “sites are selected on their content and ease of navigation”. I clicked on the website suggestion form link to see if there was anything that might enlighten me further — there was not.

Other features include  a choice between primary and secondary school searches and the site defaults to Google’s Safesearch mode of searching (although this may make little difference to many schools with their own filters).

In all the searches I perform/supervise with students at school, this search engine returns the highest number of relevant, readable sites and is in the familiar Google format.  Yes, yes they should get to know the many advantages of the others and I encourage them to experiment but as far as reducing the frustration factor goes, this one wins hands down so far.

I’m back on to acquainting myself with the many search engines available. Funny that once you start looking there are so many more than you’d imagine.

Ask Jeeves was an old favourite of mine. I used to recommend it to the kids in primary school because it coped with them typing  in a whole question. It picks out the keywords and searches for them. But it used to be pretty limited in its relevant results and very American-oriented so we dropped off using it.

It’s now called Ask Kids and has ‘grown up’ some since I used it last.

The home page is really kid friendly and clean (no advertising at all). Once in a search there are sponsored websites but no advertising. I tested both natural language (What endangered animals are there in Australia?) and keyword (volcano causes) searches.

Once you’ve hit the search button, the next screen offers you some broader and narrower search term options in a side bar(the Australian animals search options were not Australian however) and then the search results in the main body of the page.  There was much more success with the volcano search than the Australian animal question – it still appears to be heavily slanted to American audiences. The first 5 hits I did get for Australian endangered species were:

• kidcyber.com.au
• Kids’ Planet – to be searched by continent – ‘grey wolves’ were incorrectly listed under the Australian continent! and the fact sheets for most of the animals were general not Australian specific. (Info quality – poor).
• a dead link to a public library homework page
• Perth Zoo with some species listed in their conservation program

So overall a disappointing result. But Boolean searching using keywords ‘endangered animals OR species’  brought up different and better results.

I had much better luck with volcanoes. First 5 hits included:

• learner.org
• ThinkQuest
• Cascades Volcano Observatory
• Volcano Live (website of John Search scientist and volcano adventurer)
• Staffordshire Learning Net Web Enquiry (webquest)

Ask Kids also offers options to search ‘images’ and ‘video’. Again the first question had poor results, the volcano search results were much better.

One feature I really missed on this site was knowing the total number of hits for a search. It always helps me to gauge if the student is searching too broadly or narrowly.

Ask Kids has other areas including one called ‘The Schoolhouse” which features databases by subject area. I searched here too and found useful information for both topics.

Overall, this search engine performs best  if keyword searching and Boolean search strategies are used. It seems to be well pitched for middle primary to lower secondary or for ESL students. Subjects still need to be fairly general in order to get decent search results.

This week I’ve been concentrating on the workbook exercises that have to do with The Catalogue and some of the questions in the book (eg. Find out about other cataloguing networks) put me in mind of a site I’d stumbled on last year but hadn’t checked in on in a while – The Open Library

The Open Library has a goal  – to create a web-page for every book ever published. At the time it seemed like a helluva(n) undertaking and while I cruised around on it admiring the enormous amount of content (today it has 23,543,896 books listed) I remember vaguely wondering why they were doing it. So today (a bit older and wiser) I went in search of the answer online. I came across this article in the UK Guardian.

I really admire what they are trying to do and was pleasantly surprised and interested to see the person driving the bus was Australian and has been involved with several other mega-projects including Flickr and the Flickr Commons scheme. I loved this idea especially:

“Imagine books more as a networked object, rather than a single entity,” she suggests. “We start with this kernel and then we see what we can pile onto it … it’s a locus for all the information about a book that’s on the wider web.”

If you have the time it’s worth looking through the FAQs , take a guided tour or read about some of the challenges they are working through as they develop a completely new kind of catalogue. They are rethinking everything from points of access (eg. Subject headings) to the schema of the information to the technology that will support it. They are building a catalogue for the public not just libraries and librarians. They are building it using a wiki, using the good will of many organizations and individuals  and they are building it to be completely open to editing.

This is a real opportunity to watch one of the future directions of catalogues/cataloguing being born. And one I will be keeping a closer eye on (and maybe one day participating in) now that I am a student of ETL505 Accessing Information.

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Photo from Flickr by: 1541