In all my years of doing and teaching research, and searching for answers, there are two alternative places I like to look when trying to find information I know little about.

The first place is The Reader’s Adviser published by R. R. Bowker in six volumes. Of course the old set I have is the 14^th edition, 1994, LCCN # 57-13277. I’ve been unable to find any online equivalent of this set on CD-ROM or digitized, although there appears to be a readers advisor online database available through ABC-CLIO, but seemingly only available to libraries. ALA does have a series called Reader’s Advisory which could be an updated replacement, but has limited subjects. And there is Robert Teeter’s web site having many resources listed as well.

Volume 6 of Reader’s Adviser, is an index of publishers, names, titles, and subjects. The other volumes cover large subjects such as Reference works and Literature, Science & Medical, Philosophy and Religion, Social Sciences, and World Literature. Each section of each volume has broken down bibliographies of the related topics and sub-topics with articles about each of those subject areas. These bibliographies give a person/librarian a good taxonomy of words to use in any online search, as well as additional information about who the experts are, and other possible resources for answers.

A second set of books I like to use, is the two volume set, The Great Ideas; a Syntopicon of the Great Books of the Western World.  This link is a description of the book and its contents at the Hathi-Trust. Many libraries may still have this in their collection. The volumes contain general articles of 102 topics with breakouts of all sub-headings of the topics one might want to know about, and an index of related articles in the 54+ volumes of the “Great Books.” It’s not unlike a clustering search engine in covering many sub-topics.

Now, having mentioned the clustering search engines, I’ve used Karnak, and Clusty–renamed Yippy; neither now exist. One reviewer says, using these is not a good way to locate closely related terms. I disagree. The one I’ve discovered and use now, is Carrot2. Carrot2 is a wonderful program which works well with MS Edge, Firefox, Opera, and other browsers. Doing a search of “search and research” Carrot2 came up with all sorts of research databases and search engine sites including directories of such. You can have the clusters in a list, a tree-map, or pie-chart. I like all three of the presentations.

Looking for answers sometimes brings us to look at many alternatives; generally, the do-it-yourself kind.

Often it is the alternative between easy (do what we can now,) or harder, do what will require more time or money. So this is about some of those alternatives taken.

When it comes to “what-cha-ma-call-it” questions, Thesauruses, Synonym, and Antonym dictionaries don’t always work, but some taxonomies may help. Finding one can be difficult, but this directory and databases of controlled vocabulary, could be useful. It includes the Taxonomy Warehouse which I’ve used on occasion; finding already built taxonomies for clients.

Some years ago when developing a database of candidates for a personnel service firm, I was wondering how best to put all the information about a person’s expertise into a formal database. I knew there were expensive programs out there for that, such as MS Access which we had, but we were in need of something to be done, often, very quickly. Since we already had all the letters and resumes from the candidates scanned in the computer as Word documents, we tried something different. We put all the letters and resumes into a single MS Word file, and were able to search the candidates for their expertise successfully using the “find” command.

Yes; later we took the information and placed it in an MS Access database, but in a burst of speed necessary, we were able to find and print a report of the candidates we needed for presentation to a client.

In another instance, taking notes and photographing them, then adding those photos to a note taking program like EverNote, allowed us to search those notes and bring up the items we needed.  From an article from MakeUseOf I saw a similar suggestion for indexing books not found on Google. One could enter subjects or notes based on chapters at the front or back of the book, and take photos of those notes; put them into EverNote or One Note and be able to search quickly in that same manner.

Working with a collection of rare race car books and photos, which contained information about motor serial numbers, chassis numbers, and other race result information, we needed to develop a new scheme instead of using the Dewey Decimal outline. This was important because the vintage cars being repaired and sold, often required original equipment; and restored cars brought $millions.

We did use the decimal system but gave each type of auto a place; 100s, 200s, 300s, 400s, etc. One of the sections of the scheme included all the manufacturer’s names, another all the pictorial books, thus getting everything together on the shelf similar to the Dewey System, but representing an arrangement of race cars, car manufacturers, and photos. The collection owner used this information for restorations of the cars he bought, and sold. In addition to giving the normal description of the book into our software, BookCat, we were able to add fields and ‘see’ and ‘see also’ notes for a taxonomy which allowed for searching all categories without worry of losing something in the translation of a term used by our foreign neighbors. This was a departure from the regular Dewey which didn’t give us enough depth for these specific fields. I haven’t heard, but we were hoping this collection and the catalog would someday end up at the America’s Auto Museum in Tacoma, WA, where there is a large program for restoring cars.

In one of my earlier pieces in Public Libraries Online, on finding answers, I wrote about the alternate use of cards in a drawer with our experts names on them and their particular expertise. It was somewhat like a card catalog except a topic subject was named, the expert, and a phone number…with the cards filed by topic. This was before PC databases, but could be used as a quick “write it down and enter it later scheme.”

I believe most librarians will find what works for their collections usage—not just doing the standard library descriptions and processes, but looking at how resources are being used and present a much greater access to what is needed and wanted by the public. One can do this often by asking questions of the patrons like, “What is the most important thing you need or need to know?” This often reveals a pattern through others as to what enhancements would be valuable.

Employed by a state prison as Director of Libraries, I realized we were receiving continued questions about businesses. Noticing what was being asked, I then realized we had a need for business planning books and resources. Receiving a grant, we set up a collection of business planning books, and developed a course on business planning for inmates; the course becoming a model for other prison libraries.

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So it seems libraries, at least a few academic libraries and public libraries, have caught up with this single search process, known also as federated search, (rather than searching fields in the library catalog,) as a way to introduce the researcher to articles, books, and resources valued enough to show up in the search. Which algorithms are used to go search sites other than just the library or libraries within academic institutions are not always given. For example with Google, we don’t know if there are items valued by payment, by peer review, or customer searching; giving the searcher what the computer thinks the customer wants.

I’ve been a critique of searching different engines which seem to want to tell the customer, “This is what we think you asked for,” instead of giving results one might have wanted which show both sides or even every perspective of a given event, subject, or category. This may be the reason there are now many private search engines. These are the engines that do not track what you search and do not leave cookies on your machine. Oscobo, WhaleSlide, Gyffu, and GoodGopher which have been launched in the last two or three years. Other well-known engines are StartPage, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, and Privatelee.

So as we start using these ‘boxes’ of information we hope we will see complete information, not algorithm-generated results, nor subjective selection. One search engine used mainly for scientific research may be the way of future searching. Semantic Scholar’s AI analyzes research papers, articles, journals, and through data mining pulls out authors, references, figures, and topics. It then links all of this information together into a comprehensive picture of cutting-edge research. This engine sounds like a few of the early MIND-mapping or VISUAL mapping engines which brought related topics to the surface from searching related topics. Unfortunately we don’t see those engines anymore, only the mind-mapping do it yourself software. Over the last ten years there have been several books about semantic search; several available from ALA. We are now seeing many books using terms like Knowledge Graph equating much with the same process as semantic searching.

Resources:

Mother lode of searching databases:

Looking for a specific category database?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_databases

Searching the CIA declassified database.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/sep/22/crest-search-guide/

Ways to search breaking news stories.

http://blog.archive.org/2017/09/21/tv-news-chyron-data/

Tracking corporate violations of law and regulations.

Article: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/from-enron-to-wells-fargo-expanded-violation-tracker-now-covers-18-years-of-corporate-crime–misconduct-300521979.html

Databases:

https://www.goodjobsfirst.org/violation-tracker

https://www.goodjobsfirst.org/

The post Bento Box Searching first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

ID Search allows journalists to search by document source (such as the Panama Companies Registry), person, or company. Journalists can also set up email alerts notifying them when new results appear for their searches or for persons on official watchlists. They can set up their own private watchlists as well. According to OCCRP, “most sources” on ID Search are updated every twenty-four hours.^[2]

IDSearch is part of OCCRP’s Investigative Dashboard (ID), a platform that brings together data search, visualizations and researcher expertise.

Journalists and Librarians Are a Natural Match

Journalists and librarians have common a goal: the pursuit of the truth through information and research. Libraries can actively support local journalists by highlighting tools such as ID Search and other research databases.

One way might be to curate a page on your website of tools and resources for journalists or create a postcard to send to local media outlets. This blog post from TechSoup for Libraries offers even more ideas for catering to local journalists as well as some of the benefits of inviting media into your library.

You could also team up with a media outlet to offer programming around media creation and journalism. The Dallas Public Library and The Dallas Morning News are supporting the next generation of journalists through an initiative called “Storytellers Without Borders.” A Knight News Challenge grant-winner, the program encourages high school students to engage with community members while learning about opportunities in libraries and journalism.^[3] The application process for Storytellers Without Borders opens in August.

Why Libraries Should Support Journalism

Kelly Baxter of the Dallas Public Library wrote about how journalists and library science professionals experience many of the same challenges: Both have to deal with constantly changing information sources and technology. The project not only demonstrates the role libraries play in the “research, creation, and dissemination” of journalism but also “reinforces the public library’s role as a community center; a neutral space where diverse individuals are encouraged to come together to educate one another through the sharing of ideas and experience.”^[4]

Public libraries can facilitate factual, research-based journalism, whether that’s training the journalists of tomorrow or sharing tools such as ID Search.

Resources

Ginny Mies, “The Library as a Newsroom,” TechSoup for Libraries, February 11, 2014.

References

[1] Tom King, “OCCRP Launches New Search Engine for Investigative Journalists,” Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, May 30, 2016.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Christine Schmidt, “Dallas Public Library, Dallas Morning News Team up to Develop Teenage Storytellers,” The Scoop Blog, June 23, 2016.

[4] Kelly Baxter, “Storytellers Without Borders: Activating the Next Generation of Community Journalists Through Library Engagement,” Knight News Challenge, April 22, 2016.

The post Journalists and Librarians: A Common Goal first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

I’m sometimes caught with my jaw open. In working with many librarians on various discussion lists, I find they seem to be looking for things and answers only on those databases and aggregators of databases to which they have corporate access, such as ProQuest, EBSCOhost, Gale databases, et al. Of course, this is done because these databases are considered safe and more reliable information than items found on the Internet. But my jaw drops when I find they haven’t made an effort to search the Internet, or they haven’t found what they need from the Internet when indeed it can be found. In any case, the Internet can be and is, for a librarian, a friend.

Lots of information can be found using various search engines and search operands with the Internet. To be honest, it seems the Internet is now about finding more friends or connections than you can deal with, finding more restaurants for which you have no time to eat at, or in the case of a chosen career, finding more jobs for which you won’t ever qualify, and more than you even want to be qualified for. To me, it seems that more people are making money online telling me how to write, how to market, how to publish, and how to annoy as many people as possible to sell my stories, than those actually writing stories and nonfiction.

This piece is about finding resources to help you use the Internet more effectively and efficiently.

Search Engines

There are lots of directories of search engines—engines for countries, for collectors, for researchers, for almost any endeavor you might be engaged in.

Phil Bradley has a short annotated list. The site also has articles about using the different search engines and gives a listing of social media tools, and the blogs about searching can keep you up-to-date.

Mashable has a listing organized hierarchically for general, human-generated, book and library, business, music- and video-related, blog and RSS engines, and miscellaneous topical engines. These are somewhat similar to the Wikipedia layout below.

Wikipedia has an interesting and useful breakdown of search engines and what they do: sorting out those of general content, specific topics, a grouping based on model (hierarchical, index, clustering, meta, semantic, visual, etc.,) and a section telling us which search engine indexes these various engines are using, if not their own.

SearchEngineWatch.com is one of the premier sites to find information about search engines, marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), and many articles about the difference in engines. It was one of the first of such sites and used to have a very easy-to-find chart of all the operands used for the various search engines. Initially SEW was on the top of my list, but it has gone far into the business of marketing and helping webmasters to create pages so search engines can find them, rather than about searching and research.

Using Boolean and Scripts

Operand charts include Google. Many university libraries, like University of New Orleans and Berkeley, already have Boolean charts available outlining operands for several library databases.

Some software programs can generate scripts for searching. A book some might wish to read is Alison and Adrian Stacey’s Effective Information Retrieval from the Internet: An Advanced User’s Guide. I’ve also mentioned Tara Calishan’s book Web Search Garage in another article.

A 2004 presentation by Marcus P. Zillman, “Searching the Internet Using Brains and Bots,” provide for some great—if a bit dated—resources for searching and/or teaching library literacy.

In the music business, finding a piece of sheet music can be difficult, unless you know that various publishers have contractual agreements with publishing groups in other countries. A European publisher will have agents for their works in the U.S. but not necessarily under the original publisher’s name. TRO, Inc. in New York City has or had at one point, contracts with music publishing groups in seventeen countries. You could often go to TRO to find something published in Europe and other countries but unavailable from the original publisher. You can discover who these agents are, usually, by surveying the original publisher’s entire website.

Not everyone can know details about all businesses, but persistent and creative searching can often reveal such things. At this point in time, as essential as bibliographic instruction is, knowledge of searching is at least as important to the librarian, and it really helps to know the inside workings of various fields of business.

The post Search vs. Research first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

If we are asking a question, the way we ask can disrupt the course of inquiry…if we ask the wrong question.

Many other more recent books and search engines have been engaged in struggling with the semantics of questions and queries. The new one by Leslie Stebbins, Finding Reliable Information Online: Adventures of an Information Sleuth, suggests there are many issues related to ‘Search Psychology” when evaluating the reliability of answers.

Whether we are searching online or doing research for a solution, the results are based on the questions we ask and how we ask them. I found recently that when a music library was asking to find opera glass reviews, using those two separate and common words, that search results were about glasses and operas, but little about those little binoculars called opera glasses. Hyphenating the same terms, “opera-glasses,” brought reviews to the top of search results.

We have a number of issues when searching online looking for the right combination of terms and operands such as InURL:PDF and using space between words, such as the undocumented Google proximity operand, AROUND(5). Many of the tips we find for searching exist as a result of others’ trial and error or from reading books of those who have studied search extensively like Web Search Garage, Yahoo to the Max, The Extreme Searcher’s Guide to Web Search Engines, The Skeptical Business Searcher and the newer one mentioned above. Someone, maybe several, have put all the operands on the net.

Organizations have been looking for solutions to good management for decades. Such processes as used by efficiency experts, management by objectives, total quality management, quality circles, Deming methods, re-engineering, strategic planning, and most notably recent, re-branding everything. Since we keep seeing new ideas along with a plethora of books on creative thinking and innovation, perhaps we are not asking the right questions. A few years ago, Special Librarians were asking what they must do to stop their company from closing the corporate libraries, as if they could do something different to make those events stop. As I explained in a long letter to the editor of Information Outlook, “It’s not about us,” it wasn’t our fault.² Mergers require someone to pay the debt created and often some of it is born by those corporate libraries which are closed.

The real question might have been, “How do we stay connected to top management or board of directors who make such decisions?” I’m aware of one library that died and took with it all the microfiche that told the engineers what type of metals were used for connections to underwater cables—a necessary thing—lost information requiring new onsite checks.

In 60 AD, Petronius Arbiter, a Roman Imperial Army officer, was attributed as saying, “I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by re-organizing and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”³

More recently since the 1990s, due to a translation and publication of a Russian book, Theory of Inventive Problem Solving by Genrich Altshuller, U.S. Engineers have become acquainted with TRIZ, a systematic innovation methodology. TRIZ is a process through which engineers can sort out and optimize the best approach to a solution. It’s about finding the right questions as to what is to be solved. Sometimes through the forty principles, finding ‘conflicts’ or ‘contradictions’ lead to new questions leading to different solutions than those anticipated. TRIZ is used at Boeing Company and some others. Some businesses have adapted the program or process. I’m unaware of any libraries using this powerful process, TRIZ, for finding the right questions for organizational development or re-branding.

The recent Gallup poll tells us that only 32 percent of staff of corporations (and maybe large libraries) are really engaged in all of this rebranding, re-engineering, and various innovation programs. Possibly, it is because the emphasis is on changing processes and organizational charts, rather than giving responsibility to line staff for finding solutions at lowest levels. Gaining solutions to library problems and issues should be about finding and asking the right questions. One bad or one good experience with a library with line personnel will color a patron’s confidence in all libraries.

References:

¹ Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. (New York: New American Library, 1953), 1.

² Editor, message from author, June 1, 2004.

³ Petronius Arbiter, quoted in Quote Investigator.

Resources:

Every Google Search Operator You’ll Ever Need

The post Finding Answers III: Searching For the Right Questions first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

What Makes a Site “Mobile-Friendly”

So what exactly qualifies as “mobile-friendly?” If you’ve ever tried to navigate a site on your smartphone that isn’t optimized for mobile, you may have experienced the frustration of not being able to read text because it’s too small or accidentally clicking on the wrong link. These are two of the elements Google checks: text size and link distance.

The other element Google checks is your site’s mobile viewport configuration. A viewport determines how a webpage is displayed on a mobile device. Without a viewport, mobile devices will display your page at desktop width, scaled to fit the screen, making it a pain to navigate. A responsive, mobile-friendly website has different layouts for different screen sizes: from large tablets to smartphones with 4-inch displays.

How to Check the Mobile-Friendliness of Your Site

If you’re not sure where your website stands in mobile-friendliness, Google helpfully provides you with a few free tools:

• You can also test individual pages using Google’s Mobile-Friendly test, which analyzes your page’s URL and reports if it has a mobile-friendly design.
• Google’s Mobile Usability feature, part of the Webmaster toolset, can help you identify mobile usability issues with your site.
• Fetch as Google lets you see your web pages the way Google’s smartphone crawler would.
• Chrome’s Device Mode and Mobile Emulation tool lets you check your mobile website’s responsiveness across various screen sizes, and assess its performance across varying connection speeds.
• If you need further assistance or explanation, you can always ask questions (and find answers!) at Google’s Webmaster Central Help Forum.

How Your Content Management System Can Help

Many content management systems (CMSes), including library-specific CMSes, offer some sort of toolset or themes to help you take your site mobile. WordPress, for example, offers WPtouch, a plug-in that automatically enables a mobile theme for visitors reaching you by way of their phones. Drupal, an open source CMS, offers mobile-friendly themes for your website. Google has a helpful guide for optimizing your Drupal site for mobile. Sites built with LibGuides are responsive out of the box so you don’t have to do any of the work to ensure your site displays correctly on all devices.

Google’s ever-changing search and indexing algorithms can be frustrating to deal with. But this particular change should serve as a nudge to start thinking about a mobile strategy for your library’s website. As nearly two-thirds of American adults own a smartphone (Pew Research Center), it is becoming increasingly important to reach your patrons wirelessly. By beginning the mobile optimization process, you will not only stay ahead of the Google game, but you’ll also better serve your smartphone-carrying patrons.

The post What Google’s Algorithm Change Means for Library Websites first appeared on Public Libraries Online.