MyLibrary

On the mylib-dev mailing list a person saw a press release regarding Notre Dame’s acquisition of Primo, and they asked, “There is concern from some on-campus here that this announcement means the end of future development of MyLibrary. What can I tell them?” I thought I’d echo my reply, below.

As Rob said, there are not any plans to discontinue the work/development of MyLibrary. MyLibrary is alive and well.

We here at Notre Dame we use MyLibrary to drive much of our website. [1, 2, 3] It works. It does what it is suppose to do. We also use it to manage a couple of other digital library thingees. For example, it drives a FAQ for our reference department [4], and we expect to expand this beyond the reference department. We also use it to drive much of the fledgling “Catholic Portal” [5].

MyLibrary is getting tweaked

MyLibrary is getting tweaked. For example, more granular recommendations against information resources will be implemented in order to satisfy a need for our upcoming website redesign. I believe librarians will be able to prioritize recommended resources in the form of a numbered list. “This is the most important resource. This is the second most important resource. Etc.” Work is also being done in regards to a statistics module. Count how many times a resources has been used and by what type of person. This will enable us to answer questions such as, “What resources is most popular?” and “What resources are used by people like you?” I hope these enhancements will be finished by the end of the summer. (Famous last words.)

MyLibrary is not a turn-key application

MyLibrary 3.x is a long way from MyLibrary 2.x. The later version is not a turn-key application; it is a true object-oriented module. I think this scared many would-be MyLibrary adopters away. To use MyLibrary 3.x there needs to be true co-operation between librarian and developer. This gap is sometimes difficult to bridge. Moreover, the implementation of facet/term combinations (which just so happened to pre-date the current fascination with “faceted browsing” in our “next-generation” library catalogs) is really rather foreign to many people. Most of us are used to LCSH and the like. I allude to many of these ideas in an upcoming article that will be appearing in Information Technology & Libraries (ITAL) sometime in September. I will also elaborate on these ideas at the Access Conference in October.

MyLibrary vs Primo

Finally, MyLibrary provides complementary services when compared to “next-generation” library catalog things such as Primo, VUFind, and AquaBrowser. Technically speaking, MyLibrary is a Perl-based API allowing the librarian and developer to read/write to a specifically shaped database. This this sense, MyLibrary is digital library framework and toolbox. Librarians and developers are expected to fill the MyLibrary database with content, write reports against the database, and thus facilitate digital library collections and services. As they are being touted and implemented, “next-generation” library catalog applications are essentially indexes with enhanced services applied against them. Aggregate content. Index it. Provide access to the index (search), and provide additional services against the index (Did you mean?, faceted browse, relevancy ranked output, tagging, etc.). As a database application, MyLibrary purposely does not support search very well. To support search librarians and developers are expected to pipe their content to an indexer like swish-e, Kinosearch, or Lucene — the indexers supporting most “next-generation” library catalog systems. On the other hand, “next-generation” library catalogs do not support the finely grained data creation and maintenance operations a database can support, nor can they have the flexibility to create the myriad of reports that MyLibrary can generate. MyLibrary and things like Primo each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Neither one is a silver bullet for implementing the sorts of information services our patrons increasingly expect.

In short, MyLibrary is more like a database application. “Next-generation” library catalog systems are more like indexes. Databases and indexes are two sides of the same information retrieval coin.

Links

[1] Subject page - http://www.library.nd.edu/subjects/
[2] Formats page - http://www.library.nd.edu/formats/
[3] Tools page - http://www.library.nd.edu/research_tools/
[4] FAQ - http://www.library.nd.edu/reference/faq/
[5] Catholic Portal - http://www.catholicresearch.net/

Tags: General Information //