Google and Beyond. Phil Bradley. Edinburgh. 13/6/11

Here are the most relevant nuggets I gathered from this event.

Google Tips:
Google search stories. Sadly as this is on YouTube, it’s surfcontrolled in my workplace. What we could do (if we ever find a way to show YouTube) is have a rolling course intro page that can play as delegates come in to our courses. Or, it would be great to use in our Internet Skills course. We let the delegates pick their own topic, and ask them to run Google searches on web search, maps, news etc. It’s a way of highlighting that there are different kinds of searches you can do on Google- you aren’t limited to the home page search box. Could be a good lesson for our Google users, and it’ll be a bit fun and different. If only we had YouTube. Damn!!

Google is an advertising company. 97% of its revenue comes from carrying adverts.

Google monitors your search history and will bias future search results accordingly. That’s one reason why everyone’s search results differ.

Google will produce different search results depending on the order in which you type your search terms. You can also promote a search term simply by repeating it.

Use + before a search term to force Google to search on the term as you typed it (You may have noticed Google now automatically ‘corrects’ search terms it thinks you’ve misspelt).

Use ~ before a search term to also search for synonyms.

Apparently Google has been supporting proximity searching for years – but didn’t advertise it. For example ‘Three AROUND(3) mice’ will produce results where the words ‘three’ and ‘mice’ occur within 3 words of each other.

Phil terms Google Advanced Search ‘Simplified Search’, because that’s what it does if you have a complex search.

The new filter for ‘Reading level’ was tested by US teachers categorising hundreds of results. May be useful if you want to just retrieve results for users with low reading ability or children. Otherwise not much use.

Use the ‘Find pages that link to the page’ function to help judge the quality of that page. ie if good quality pages are linking to it, then that’s an indicator the page is of good quality too.

Like Google’s Wonder Wheel (a graphical display of your search results – useful for showing related concepts), Google’s newly launched Image Swirl does the same thing for image searching.

Running a search, then clicking on ‘Related Searches’ (on the left hand column) will produce a list of similar searches you could do.

Define option has now been replaced by the dictionary.

Social Media search engines:
These search for content for social media tools. Socialmention is a good one. Also Who’s Talkin.

Google Realtime. Searches for mentions of your keywords in Twitter and Facebook. Includes a timeline which works better than Twitter’s.

According to Phil, we’ll see more of this as search engines adapt to search content produced by social media tools.

Other Google searches:
Google Discussions. Searches discussion sites like Google Groups, Forums, Flickr groups etc.

Google Squared. Creates a spreadsheet of content. Very new and only seems to work if your search terms are broad enough. A bit rubbish.

Google Custom Search. This has been around for years, but I’ve never got round to seriously thinking about it. Now having thought about it, I think we could use this to good effect in our Library's subject pages. Essentially you’re creating your own Google search engine, where you add a list of websites you want to search. That way you can still offer a Google search to users, but it will only retrieve results from the sites you’ve included. As we already have lists of quality websites we’ve included in our Netvibes pages and our subject pages, it would be a simple matter to take those sites and put them into a Google search. The link to each Google search would be at the top and centre of each subject page.

‘Me on the Web’ is a brand new Google tool that allows you to set up Alerts for mentions of you on the web, plus other resources to help monitor and control your online identity. We can use the Alerts feature within my workplace. But the other resources require at least IE8.

Other search tools:
There is only 4%-10% of overlap between the major search engines. Ranking Thumbshots illustrates this point well.

ixquick and duckduckgo search engines are private in that unlike Google, they don’t keep your search history or monitor your searches.

Addict-o-matic. I kind of like this. It’s a meta search engine that displays results in a dashboard.

Wolfram Alpha is a search engine for facts and figures. And Worldometers is good for global stats.

Quora. A ‘question and answer’ tool that connects to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, thereby enabling you to ask a question to all your Twitter and Facebook followers, and see their questions and answers too.

Flipboard. One to watch. Currently only on iPad, but will be launched on iPhone later this year. It turns your Facebook and Twitter content into a ‘social magazine’ format. If you can’t wait till then, try Pulse News (available on iPad, iPhone and Android).

Use Trunk.ly to get a weekly email listing all the links provided by your followers’ social media accounts. ‘Never forget a link’ is its motto. Think of it as a social bookmarking tool for Twitter, Facebook or any other social media tool.

Lanyrd links to your Twitter followers, looks for mentions of forthcoming events in their Tweets and displays details those forthcoming events in a calendar. Receive updates in a daily email.

Further reading:
Check out Phil’s website and subscribe to Phil’s search blog and his social media blog.

Library Day in the Life - round 5

This is my contribution to round 5 of the Library Day in the Life project. But rather than a day in my life, what follows is more a round-up of what this Scottish Government Librarian has been up to in the last week.

This year the Scottish Government Library was at last able to secure accommodation in one of our key offices - Victoria Quay in Edinburgh. So I'm now working peripatetically between two sites. This week, working 3 days at our office in Saughton House, Edinburgh and 2 at Victoria Quay.

So. What's a week in the life of this Government librarian like? I'm part of an 5 strong enquiry team, which shares the enquiries desk on a daily rota. Of course, this is great as I never know what I'm going to get. Although in truth many requests are for copies of publications, which our super-efficient Library Assistant answers usually within 15 minutes. Though I had my share of more detailed enquiries this week which ranged from a member of the public requesting copies of responses to a fairly old consultation conducted by the Scottish Government on regulations for milk quotas for farms in southern Scotland, to finding a copy of the consolidated version of the Railways Act (1993). On average over the past three months 4.4% of our requests came from members of the public.

As part of my job I also conduct literature searches. These are varied, often interesting and topical. For example, this week I conducted literature searches across a wide range of subscription databases (beat that, Google!) on:

Flexible staff resourcing
Imaginary companions in adults
Decriminalisation of drugs

Can't resist the swipe at Google, but I mention it because one of the requesters for one of these searches had searched Google and came to us when he found very little. Some carefully built search strategies and considered choosing of databases soon revealed quite a few 'spot on' publications he hadn't found on Google.

This leads me onto my information literacy work, which largely involves me co-writing and co-delivering information skills training for Scottish Government staff.

Our training is part of the course programme for the whole organisation. With the next programme running from October to March, I'm involved with other team members in pulling our library programme together. This week myself and my boss had an initial discussion sketching out the programme. With growing waiting lists for our courses (which is quite flattering) the discussion led onto our desire to deliver our training as elearning packages so all Scottish Government staff can access our courses on their desktops. Probably via Moodle. This is something we really want to do urgently. But to do it well will take some time.

Incidentally, anyone can see our training materials here.

This week also saw me complete a stage of a big project I'm managing, and all of us in team are working on, to create a subject based library of RSS feeds via Netvibes for Scottish Government staff. Or in fact, anyone who would find it useful. It's still in development, but you'll find the completed Government through to Planning and Building pages here.

Particular challenges the project threw up this week had me scratching my head over why some EBSCOhost RSS feeds appear to break after a while, and considering the merits of RSS to email services offered by Feedburner and MailChimp.

Yes. RSS to email. The irony of having folk check in on a Netvibes page to see results of RSS feeds hasn't escaped me, so part of this project is to offer an RSS to email subscription service. Which you can also try out right now on our Netvibes page if you wish.

And that, is a week in the life of a Scottish Government librarian.

What on Earth have I been doing?

I've been doing some tidying up on my holidays. I have. And look what I found down the back of my sofa. Only my blog! So apologies for being so rubbish at updating, but here we go...

It's been a busy old time since I last wrote. The thing that has been foremost in my mind about my work is the spectre of public sector cuts. Next year could see changes to what I do. The thing I do most and seems to carry most kudos is the Internet skills training I write and deliver with my colleagues. The value of the other information services I and my colleagues supply seems only to be fully appreciated by our customers, in the most part. My point is training seems to be the way to go. And that will evolve. We'll do differently. Change emphasis. Produce eLearning packages. But there is an understanding that information literacy skills are needed.

So, I look forward to continue co-writing and co-delivering our various Internet skills packages (also available for all to see at http://sglibraryservices.wordpress.com/ generous, sharing, publicly funded types that we are). I suspect I'll be helping to do a fair bit of updating over the next few months.

Then there's newspapers. Staff in the Scottish Government buy print newspapers. Lots of newspapers. For much of the past year we seem to have been chasing various online news options as a more cost-effective alternative. But with News International and now other publishers wanting money for individual online access, and the likes of LexisNexis charging more than we can afford with our budgetary contraints, it's proving to be a real challenge. I wonder how other libraries (public libraries excepted) are providing news. Are we all just encouraging users to go on Google News? Which I see has just had a makeover, incidentally.

On a more positive note last year I spent sometime with a colleague giving our 'Alerts Centre' an overhaul. It's a one-stop-shop for Scottish Government staff offering advice on how to keep up-to-date on their subject areas. Job done. I thought 'right then, now we really must do something to encourage staff to use RSS'. RSS is something covered in our Web 2.0 Workshop and is a new, even strange concept to most course attendees. All of whom are Scottish Government or Agency staff.

I'm really pleased that the idea enjoyed alot of support from colleagues and I ran with it until I ended up building a Netvibes page to include RSS feeds by subject. Having demonstrated a draft version on 26/4 and 8/6 to colleagues, this was given the go ahead and we're now at the stage of populating the various subject tabs. Check it out if so inclined at http://www.netvibes.com/sglibraryservices.

I did come across some really good examples of organisations offering RSS feeds via Netvibes which helped alot when developing ours. Not least Shrewsbury and Telford Health Libraries: Team Knowledge Update. See http://www.netvibes.com/sathlibraries.

If only I can get Google Analytics to work (it did on the test tabs I had running!) I'd be a very smiley chap. I hope Analytics is just being slow at producing the first statistics.

Why we need to teach information literacy skills for the Internet

On 26th March I was lucky enough to see Tara Brabazon deliver the ISG (Scotland) Annual Lecture.

Portrayed by the media as being 'anti-Google' and a controversial commentator on the digital world her assertion that the Internet isn't a library and Google isn't a catalogue is, unsuprisingly, very much in tune with librarians' thinking.

She states the Internet is far from being an inclusive place where everyone can equally publish and access information. Fair to say, librarians know this and agree.

She highlights there are many in our society who for a variety of reasons are excluded from digital information and describes an information literacy matrix she uses with her students to build an 'information scaffold' enabling them to apply information literacy skills.

To illustrate, she described traditional models of literacy (citing Mary Macken-Horarik's 4 tier model of literacy) as being horizontal (or linear) and using teaching strategies to progress from the easier skills to the harder skills right through to the top tier. All very familiar. But then there's the Internet. A place where people do their online shopping, and routinely cut and paste stuff they think must be accurate because it's in the first page of their Google search results. She went on to describe the movement of information on Web 2.0 tools as "bouncing on the crust of knowledge". People's representation of an event as the story is bounced around the Internet. Where is the truth?

Tara argues the shallowness of this online information seeking behaviour requires an information scaffold to enable us all to apply information literacy skills to the Internet beyond simply how to use particular Web 2.0 tools. In short, she argues information literacy skills are required to take us from the 'how' of Web 2.0 to the 'why'. This is why we need to teach information literacy skills for the Internet.

Tara Brabazon is Professor of Media Studies at The University of Brighton.

My library route

This is my contribution to the Library Routes Project. I, too, am an accidental librarian. I remember childhood trips into Edinburgh with my Dad most Saturdays would include a visit to Edinburgh Central Library. More worryingly, I vividly recall 'cataloguing' my own books based on the Browne system used by my local library in Inverkeithing. Which I was recently saddened to discover has been closed and relocated into the town's Civic Centre. Although, to be fair, it was about the most inaccessible library I've ever seen.

During my teenage years I didn't pay libraries much mind. I was an infrequent user, but always held the belief they were a good thing - that anyone could walk in of the street to a public library and avail themselves of their services free of charge. After a few jobs after college I successfully applied for the Library Assistant post at NHS Health Scotland (then known as the Health Education Board for Scotland). And so, my career in librarianship commenced at 9.30 on the 31st March 1993 in a small library of 5 staff in leafy Morningside, Edinburgh. The fact that remember this so well indicates I found my niche.

OK, so initially I photocopied articles and performed various admin duties. But I soon became more interested in undertaking a wider range of tasks. It was by this time I knew librarianship was for me. I enjoyed alot of support from our Library Services Manager, who allowed me to take on more para-professional tasks. I enquired if I could take the BSc(Hons) Library and Information Studies by Distance Learning at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. I started the course in 1997, completing in 2001 whilst continuing to work full-time at HEBS. Summer schools in Aber were a hoot. I met some wonderful friends there. Oh, and I shalln't forget the lock-ins in the Black Lion just down the road from the Llanbadarn Fawr campus.

Armed with my degree and 9 years experience, I felt ready to leave HEBS and so I started as solo librarian at ASH Scotland in August 2002. Looking back, being solo librarian brought its own challenges I hadn't anticipated. Mainly being incredibly busy single-handedly running a small library whilst developing new services (with support from my line manager). Such developments included negotiating access to The Knowledge Network (formerly the NHSScotland eLibrary) and improving the production, content and delivery of a weekly current awareness bulletin on new tobacco control publications. This in turn paved the way for me to produce a 'daily digest'. These bulletins proved very popular and our emailing list included addresses from all over Scotland and beyond.

With this post came a greater need for me to offer user education to ASH Scotland staff. This involved me offering training sessions on database searching and the production of a range of guides to databases and the library collection. A library assistant was appointed about a year after I started which helped share the workload a great deal.

After 2 years I decided I needed a change. A move to somewhere bigger. So in September 2004 I moved out of the health sector and joined the Library at Lauder College (now Carnegie College) as an Assistant Librarian. By now user education was becoming a far bigger part of my role. Giving library tours, lots of 1-2-1 student training on relevant resources to support their course work, and being involved in curriculum group meetings all served to show how important user education was. Looking back, I can see I was playing my part in teaching information literacy skills to our students. I just didn't know it then.

However, development opportunities were limited so I decided to move on, and in June 2005 I joined the Library Service at the Scottish Executive (now the Scottish Government). It was great to return to bigger library, and initially I was with our acquisitions team. With its emphasis on managing the library's document supply service and helping to manage contracts, I felt this was valuable experience. No doubt. But I did miss being on the front-end. In April 2006 I moved to the enquiry team. I've been there ever since. I currently conduct literature searches to support Scottish Government policy, and find myself involved in all manner of tasks to offer and develop information services to such a large and geographically widespread organisation. And information literacy has now become very much a central part of my job. Postings on my blog (hint, hint) will give you a measure of the specifics of the work I currently undertake.

Posted via email from Paul Gray's Blog

Library Day in the Life - round 4

This is my contribution to the Library Day in the Life project. But rather than a day in my life, what follows is more of a round-up of what this Scottish Government Librarian has been up to in the last 2 weeks.

I joined Civil Pages (a social networking site for the UK civil service) and Yammer (enterprise microblogging). Continued to administer and deliver a range of Internet skills courses (Internet Skills in the Workplace and Web 2.0 Workshop) for Scottish Government staff.

I co-delivered our Web 2.0 Workshop on 28th January. Two colleagues delivered our Internet in the Workplace session on the 2nd February in our training room, but found the room double booked. Not our fault! Some quick thinking by colleagues secured us another training room. But I checked all future bookings were OK. Thankfully, they were! This course is always popular. We have 22 people on the waiting list, so having arrange 2 additional sessions recently, I arranged a third for 23rd February.

Attended EBSCO A-Z WebEx training on 2nd February. Quite impressed by WebEx as way to deliver our own library tutorials.

Tried Ping & Posterous for ‘life-streaming’ – a quick way to update my various social media tools at once with one email. Pretty nifty!

Attended a quarterly meeting of Scottish Government librarians on 27th January in New Register House. Seeing colleagues again in a glorious building, even getting a tour, an exhibition and whisky chocolate. A wonderful morning!

With our appraisal year ending on 31st March, I arranged a progress meeting with a colleague on two of our objectives - developing our current awareness services and Library Intranet pages on 26th January. Happily, we are well on track with both. However, I did volunteer to pilot how feasible and beneficial it would be for librarians to provide an alerts service based on RSS to complement our more traditional alerting services.

Arranged for a Chartership candidate working at another library to visit us on 3rd February. Our team gave him an overview of how we operate, focusing on current awareness and marketing. Quite alot of information to cover in one morning, but he seemed to get alot out of it. He arrived back at his library to an email containing a load of links and docs we thought he would be interested in.

One of our core services for Scottish Government staff is our literature search service. Our searches are fairly comprehensive involving detailed searching of carefully selected resources, then neatly presented as a reading list in an easy-to-read Word template. Subjects I searched include:

Charging models or schemes relating to planning fees
Abolishing patient charges for prescriptions
Business models
Multi Disciplinary Practices

Posted via email from Paul Gray's Blog

BBC World Service programme on the use of Web 2.0 in everyday life

Clare Gordon at Castlemilk High School writes…

Interesting program on the BBC World Service last night about the use of Web 2.0 in everyday life. Among discussions of whether social networking is beginning to define us as individuals, there was a really interesting point about how social networking sites are beginning to be the central point around which we live our lives, rather than being an interesting added extra.

Jaron Lanier was critical of the use of social networking sites for commercial advertising, but didn't really discuss its use for making public services more accessible to users who were "born digital".

It's worth a listen: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p005zyp8

Posted via email from Paul Gray's Blog