Next Gen Discussion with time for General Questions

Summary of What Patti's Group Discussed

• Large search results from Next Generation Melvyl (NGM) are difficult to adjust.
• Facets should be customizable.
• People are confused by the overlap of the First Search version of WorldCat with our WorldCat Local.
• Clients have expressed that they would like to be able to make simultaneous interlibrary loan requests and NGM does not handle this.
  
• People don't like to use or teach NGM.
• People are worried that the FirstSearch version will going away. Patti mentioned that, like Melvyl, this is not anticipated to happen anytime soon. (Karen might have said that, but I was typing quickly.)
  
• Some felt strongly both pro and con about Amazon results appearing in NGM search results. Karen noted that only librarians were bothered by this feature in testing and focus groups.
  
• Right now librarians have difficulty locating conference proceedings in NGM.
  
• People would like to be able to limit by publisher.
• People wanted to know when or if NGM should be re-named.
  
• People want a more customizable interface than NGM currently has.
  

Martha's Group

• See Mitchell's blog notes because they were read off from his notes for the most part.
• One interesting comment (made by Patti) is that she'll send out an example of the Hathi Trust (see the link in the comments for this entry)
  
• Someone wondered how or whether OCLC could scale up all its projects and library management service. Karen replied that they have tried to model have circulation transactions based on 5% of the world's libraries participating in WorldCat as an integrated library system (ILS) and that the amount is staggering. It's how it would or will work.
  

Jim Dooley's Group

HOTS survey about language expertise led to a discussion of using those skills of bibliographers.
Another question was raised that NGM was because UC has budget troubles, but we are actually try to be able to try and get efficiencies that really concentrates on the hidden or the unique. To give attention to the resources that have been off the radar.
Questions about user service input other than saying it will be there. There is no indication of the form it will take, but don't really know. Martha comments that people may not have the "bandwidth" to do this kind of work.
Jim relates that doing surveys uncovering expertise is nice, but doing something with it is what remains critical.
Issue of finance climate makes it difficult to cooperate and move around money and it needs to be worked on. The human factors (amount of work, etc.) in terms of what we do and how we work, will have profound impacts on people. The people who need to do the work, need to buy into the process.

Karen's Group
The group mostly asked questions. The nuance of groups was felt to be important. Karen re-emphasized the common elements, but that the differences were in the report referenced in the OCLC report in her slides.
Also discussed the importance of working on CJK.
Feels its important to emphasize the beta nature of the FAS tags. There was a lot of interest in this issue. Had a discussion of why users don't tag. Noting that there needs to be a self-interest is a tag. The current look for WorldCat is more static.
Fiscal year '10 is the time for the getting more metadata exposure. For example, Ebsco will be allowing its metadata in WorldCat.
Also talked about what will catalogers do if mainstream publications are represented. Talked about the concept of redeploying labor to provide access to hidden or unique collections. The conversation also went in the direction of verification and selling it to faculty.
The use of Dewey for international resources. Outside the U.S. in Europe and in Australia, the Dewey work is used heavily for multi-language use. Pulls together information without using labor intensive subject analysis.

Question from General Audience
Placement of NGM encourages undergraduates to use it erroneously. Wonders how the stats will change.
How do you evaluate that a user is coming back?
Either it's a zero sum, or they don't shun it.
Karen suggests a click stream analysis. In her examination of some of these is that there are a lot of click throughs via Google. She says that knowing that kind of information buries that data. Using Armature, which is a tool that WorldCat uses, we might be finding more information on this. Patti is interested in this type of analysis and would like to do a presentation on the statistics. Karen noted that 80% of traffic coming from another location.