The Gordian Knot

Whoo hoo!  GK is back!  Karma has been restored in good order, and we hope to once again be posting.  Comments, as Luke indicated several months ago, have been restricted severely.  If you would like to use GK as your “place” for collaborative ILS and technology posts, please contact either Luke or I and we’ll get you set up. 

I know we were missed by many of you.   We missed you, too! 

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I am trying to take steps to reduce the deluge of spam on this blog. For the time being, only users who are registered on the blog and logged in may comment. I will continue trying to find a better way to manage the issue so that I can remove this requirement at some point in the future. I apologize for any inconvenience. Thanks!

Update: I am also disabling trackbacks and pingbacks at this time.  Those may be more difficult to bring back, because the viable anti-spam tools I’m looking at right now only handle comments, not trackbacks and pingbacks.  If you comment on a Gordian Knot article on your own blog, please leave a comment on the appropriate article in Gordian Knot linking to your post — so that the conversation can continue far and wide.  Thanks.

It’s been a little over two months since the announcement by SirsiDynix to abandon the 8.0 Horizon product line. Six groups of customers remain in its wake:

• 8.0 customers, who were live, beta, or in process of meeting paid milestones as early implementers of the 8.0 product;
• Horizon customers, who, more or less, save about 50 4.0 HIP installations, were on what they thought was a stable, anchor product;
• Dynix Classic customers, mostly large consortia, who know they’re on a stable product, but were waiting for 8.0 to be delivered in order to more smoothly migrate to a consortial-designed product;
• Sirsi customers, who, in retrospect, were either amused, attentive, or angered over all the attention the 8.0 Horizon product was getting, possibly to the detriment of their own Unicorn line;
• the rest of the ILS customers of vendors around the world, who were waiting to see if 8.0 might be what they have been waiting for;
• and then, well, the vendors and VARS, in their own right, the “customers” of Dynix, for whom VAR relationships and add-on products and services to core Dynix and Horizon customers, are, to be blunt, their business.

A shroud of legality envelopes many of the first- and last-bulleted customers above, leaving the rest of the folks to wonder what the heck has hit them. Several libraries are probably still wondering after rounds of “vendor demos”, as probably are most of the vendors who came in to do the demonstrations.

Now all eyes are encouraged to wait for ALA; Washington, DC, an unlikely wayside layover on the path to Rome.

Ever so slowly, regional user groups are once again meeting to test the waters, to see what, if anything, can be demonstrated; what, if anything, can be believed; what, if anything, can be achieved. OZSDUG, the morphed OZDUG with an “S” for Sirsi, meets next week, Tuesday, June 5, at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri. Kansas City has been aptly coined a “crossroads” city, and so over 50 people from Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Utah will convene — Dynix, Horizon, and Unicorn users — close to the point where the Overland Trails branched west to new opportunites and new frontiers.

Notice I didn’t say “new vistas”. We have great sunsets in Kansas, as I’m sure the Oklahoma and Missouri people would agree. We really don’t have vistas, and rarely have summits. (Sometimes we’re just lucky enough to find a cafeteria tray and have a hill nearby for sledding!) We have opportunities and frontiers. We understand the “road to x” analogies. Most of us, from smaller towns than Kansas City, have broad, long, main streets. Only a few have the requisite sleeping dog in the middle of the intersection. We are proud of our small towns, and frequently watch the beauty and power of nature descend on our streets.

Some of us, on the 8.x frontier, sort of got hung out by the sunset a few months ago, as the sun slammed into the earth and plunged us into a very long night.

Will customers of Dynix be happy to travel down the Road to Rome? The tenor of OZSDUG next week will point the way. For more information on OZSDUG, contact Natasha Stephan at http://www.lindahall.org

Hennepin County Library recently began offering a service we’re calling “Author Alerts“: users can create a list of authors/performers and we send an email alert when a new title by that author is added to the catalog.

Some GK readers may be interested in what’s going on behind the scenes with this service, as we have been able to completely automate the backend processes.

On the opening page, users have the option to browse for authors, select from a list of “popular” authors or select from a list of the last ten authors previous users signed up for. The browse function works similar to an author authority search in HIP. Users type in an author’s name and we query HIP in the background and display the results for the user. (We remove uniform title entries from the results list.) As in HIP, users can browse up and down the alphabet.

After the user selects an author of interest, we request their email address and barcode number. We confirm their barcode in Horizon and store their borrower# and email address in an MSSQL database, along with the auth# from the Horizon auth table. If the user comes to AA from a link in HIP (and they are logged into HIP) we look up their borrower# and email in Horizon and enter it in for them.

Once the process is completed, the user has the option to add additional authors to her alert list.

Guest access is also available for users without accounts in our system - they are prompted for their email address and a password.

In the background, a script on our webserver queries the bib table for the author’s existing titles and stores the bib#s in the MSSQL database.

Each night a script runs to check for new titles in Horizon for each author in the AA database. The list of bib#s is compared to the existing list in the AA database. If one or more new bib#s has been added, the script generates an email to each user who has requested an alert for that author.

Patron response has been positive so far. A little over 300 users signed up during the first week , tracking about 850 authors. A couple comments from users:

“I absolutely LOVE the new Author Alerts service. I’ve been waiting years for this.”

“The author alerts are absolutely frickin’ genius…I love this service and expect my list to be dynamic and long. Thanks for the great service to us voracious readers!”

Those interested in more details should not hesitate to contact me at gpeterson at hclib.org.

I thought Library Elf was cool, despite the discussions on HorizonL.

This popped up in my Bloglines today, and after reading there were over 200+ Elf records accessible, i did the search listed in the article.
LibraryLaw Blog: Breaking Discovery - Library Elf blasts a giant hole through privacy - and why I terminated my account

I was shocked that my elf account was one of the ones listed!
My email address was listed, along with links for other people to subscribe to my elf feed, and links that took you right to my current elf record, listing items out & holds.

Yes, I had added it to Bloglines. I had it marked as a “private” feed. As Bloglines states “private subs don’t show up in blogrolls.” I had no intention for y’all to be able to see what I have on hold or checked out.

I think this is a major problem that Bloglines still indexes the feeds we mark as private and I could not find this info anywhere on their website.

Jenny Levine commented on the original post:

I hope someone more technical than me will come along and leave a comment, but I’m pretty sure this is an issue with RSS, not Elf. It’s an education issue that if you put any private feed in a public aggregator, anyone will be able to read that feed. The only patron feeds you should be able to read in Bloglines are the ones users have manually added, and the same would hold true for any feed coming from a library catalog or database.

Count me educated now.
I admit, this is the first I’ve heard of the so called Bloglines set as “private” feeds being searchable. Why aren’t private feeds protected from the spiders?

Wondering though— are Hennepin Co’s RSS patron account feeds searchable, if the patron adds them to their bloglines account? The demos I saw at CODI used Bloglines, but they talked about how they didn’t display the patron PIN and all the efforts they made to make it secure.

Glenn P., care to comment?

Several of us gathered for dinner one evening at CODI and spent some of our time together talking about collection codes (ok, I know what you’re thinking and you’re probably right). But, really, the discussion was pretty interesting!

Two libraries moving to Horizon, one from Dynix (Hennepin County) and the other from a home-brewed ILS (Columbus Metropolitan), had independantly developed similar schemes for collection codes. But more interesting were the ideas percolating for using collection codes as a basis for new title alerts.

By building out the codes using a pattern corresponding to the title’s audience, format, genre and language, new possibilities arise for creating alerts. A list of new DVDs, sure, but what about breaking the list out for kids and teens? Not just new fiction, but new mystery fiction, new romance fiction and so on. Audio CDs are hot, but what about letting patrons see only the new fiction? or non-fiction?

But wait,there’s more. We can’t list every possibility patrons might be interested in, so why not let patrons create their own custom alerts based on their needs? A Spanish immersion teacher might be interested in new children’s books in Spanish, for example. Once the lists are created you’re just one step away from being able to offer the alerts via email or RSS.

If you’ve read this far, you might be interested in playing with a tool we’re using in the backroom at HCL to look at the possibilities.

The pre-selected lists available on the HCL site are automatically updated nightly. Scripts (we use ColdFusion) used to generate the lists run SQL queries against the Horizon database, using the bib and item tables. Titles are stored in a MS SQL db and web pages built from the there to reduce the load on the Horizon db.