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Inspired by Harvard Library Lab’s “Awesome Box” project, Cornell’s Library Outside the Library (LOL) group is piloting a more automated approach to letting our users tell us which materials they find particularly stunning. Armed with a Raspberry Pi, a barcode scanner, and some bits of kit that flash and glow, we have ventured into the foreign world of hardware development. This talk will discuss what it’s like for software developers and designers to get their hands dirty, how patrons are reacting to the Awesomizer, and LOL’s not-afraid-to-fail philosophy of experimentation.
== You Gotta Keep 'em Separated: The Case for "Bento Box" Discovery Interfaces ==
* Jason Thomale, jason.thomale@unt.edu, University of North Texas Libraries
I know, I know--proposing a talk about Resource Discovery is like, ''so'' 2010.
The thing is, practically all of us--in academic libraries at least--have a similar set up for discovery, with just a few variations, and so talking about it still seems useful. Stop me if this sounds familiar. You've got a single search box on the library homepage as a starting point for discovery. And it's probably a tabbed affair, with an option for searching the catalog for books, an option for searching a discovery service for articles, an option for searching databases, and maybe a few others. Maybe you have an option to search everything at once--probably the default, if you have it. And, if you're a crazy hepcat, maybe you ''only'' have your one search that searches everything, with no tabs.
Now, the question is, for your "everything" search, are you doing a combined list of results, or are you doing it bento-box style, with a short results list from each category displayed in its own compartment?
At UNT, we've been holding off on implementing an "everything" search, for various reasons. One reason is that the evidence for either style hasn't been very clear. There's this persistent paradox that we just can't reconcile: users tell us, through word and action, that they prefer searching Google, yet, libraries aren't Google, and there are valid design reasons why we shouldn't try to oversimplify our discovery interfaces to be like Google. And there's user data that supports both sides.
Holding off on making this decision has granted us 2 years of data on how people use our tabbed search interface that does ''not'' include an "everything" search. Recently I conducted a thorough analysis of this data--specifically the usage and query data for our catalog and discovery system (Summon). And I think it helps make the case for a bento box style discovery interface. To be clear, it isn't exactly the smoking gun that I was hoping for, but the picture it paints I think is telling. At the very least, it points away from a combined-results approach.
I'm proposing a talk discussing the data we've collected, the trends we've seen, and what I think it all means--plus other reasons that we're jumping on the "bento box" discovery bandwagon and why I think "bento box" is at this point the path that least sells our souls.
