Meet Summon, our new catalog: The basics

Hello, there! I’ve come out of my long summer hibernation because there’s a big New Thing you need to know about.

This New Thing has been a long time in coming for a lot of reasons, including, well, it’s just been a complicated process getting all the parts working together.

If you go to http://library.gallaudet.edu, you’ll see it right away. No, not the new look -- I like it, myself, but as far as you’re concerned, it’s mostly cosmetic. I’m talking about Summon. It’s our new catalog, sort of.  You’ll see it named above the search box.  Below the search box, you’ll see a few options for focusing your searches, and a link to our good ol’ Classic Catalog too.

Here’s the thing about Summon: It’s big. It includes not only the usual books, DVDs, e-books, and streaming videos that we and other libraries in the Consortium offer, but also journal articles that you’d usually have to go to a database (like ProQuest, EBSCO Academic Search Complete, and PsycARTICLES) to find.

Summon is a unified search interface for most of our e-resources in addition to our usual stuff. So naturally, it runs a little differently. I thought it’d be a good idea to do a quick run-through of the basics. We’ll start with how results for books appear in Summon, then talk a little bit about journal articles.

Books

Suppose we need to find resources on bilingual families, leaving all the default options as they are -- those are the checkboxes you see underneath the search box on our home page, some of which are already checked, and others that are blank. Here’s what comes up:

 

I hope you noticed that the search brought up over 60,000 results! But fear not. On the left-hand side, you can see the usual options for narrowing your search: more-specific choices for what you want to appear on the list, which institution you’re interested in (I decided not to limit it to Gallaudet’s stuff), the types of content, and so on. There are a few more options below where I cut off the screenshot, like subject terms and publication dates, but you get the idea.

The really important part is that you can see right away exactly where to find specific items: not just which institution owns each item, but also whether it’s available, what the call number is, and which library -- or part of a library -- has it. Here’s a more complete example: 

 

So right away, you can see that our copy is available, the call number is 404.2 G76b, 2010, and you can find it in the General Stacks, downstairs. Pretty sweet! There’s also an e-book in the list, complete with a link -- in light-blue text above -- that I clicked so you can see that it’s working. We’ll cover e-books in more detail in a later post.

In some ways, Summon’s not as complicated as it looks, because it uses a neat trick: the Classic Catalog! Yep, the old bare-bones workhorse, which you may have thought died years ago, is still around, and both the title link above and the links to all the locations below it will take you to Classic Catalog records.

Journal articles

Journal articles work a little differently. Limiting the ‘bilingual families’ search to “ … articles from scholarly publications, including peer-review’ by clicking the relevant checkbox on the left side of the following picture yields this: 

 

You can see the full article citation for “Learning from bilingual family literacies” -- journal name (Language Arts), publication date (09/2012), volume and issue information (Volume 90, Issue 1), and even page numbers. Before we get to the “Full Text Online” link at the bottom, which I’m sure you’re slavering over, here’s a neat feature: 

 

Hovering your mouse pointer over the title link will bring up a preview! This will often include an abstract, so, in this case, there’s no need to get over to the article itself to find out what it’s about.

But suppose the abstract reveals that the article is probably something you want to look at in more depth. Clicking on the “Full Text Online” link for this particular article gets this: 

 

In the immortal words of Emeril LaGasse: BAM. If you’ve never heard of him, look him up in Summon!

It should be noted that if you already have the full citation of the article you want to find, our article finder will probably be a better bet. Summon and the article finder (known officially as 360 Link) are sibling products from the same company. The key difference is that, as far as finding specific articles are concerned, Summon is a searchlight, while 360 Link is a laser.

Concluding thoughts

This is the part of the post where I offer the customary caution. First, Summon doesn’t provide access to all of our e-resources. Also, the Summon catalog is still very much in beta, which means we’re still working out all the bugs -- for instance, it’s not always very clear whether or not you have access to a given full-text article or e-book -- so search with patience and care. One strategy you could use is start off with Summon, gather a few titles, then switch to Classic -- http://catalog.wrlc.org -- for a clearer picture of what’s available. This works best with finding books, e-books, and films.

Another strategy, of course, is using the big, giant, red Chat With Us! button at the top of the Summon search page during regular business hours. It’ll pop up a window that looks like this: 

 

Which, I hope, is self-explanatory.

Above all, always remember to:

• Be patient
• Get in touch with us before throwing your computer out the window

Good luck, and happy searching!

Vlog review: Day of Creation

The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard.

Vlog review: Always Coming Home

Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin.

Graphic novel doubleheader

Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá
The life and times of Martha Washington in the twenty-first century by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons

Raising Stony Mayhall

Raising Stony Mayhall by Daryl Gregory.

Vlog review of Shades of Grey

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde.

Back from ALA

Well, I’m back from California. Have been for over a week, actually! Just jumped right into work and haven’t stopped since.

The good news is that I finally finished one of my major projects for the summer, which was basically cleaning out and evaluating most of the 700s in the General Stacks downstairs. That’s mostly performing and fine arts and design, including everything from the philosophy of art to city planning, with quick stops at Oprah and sculpture along the way.

One of the biggest advantages of doing this is that you get to know the collection much better -- what’s there, what needs to be, and what isn’t. So the rest of my purchases for this year and for next year as well are going to fill in some of the gaps that were either always there or opened up by my weeding older materials.

It’s really an ongoing job; this coming academic year will include weeding our literature areas, both English-language (which I did two years ago) and foreign (I did that last year); then next summer is linguistics, which I did three years ago. The schedule is wonky because I often buy more for one area than another in a given year on a rotating basis.

The deeper knowledge of your collection gained by pruning it down to size dovetails pretty well with one program I went to at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim last week, in fact. It was called, appropriately enough, “Transforming Collections,” and focused largely on how e-books are playing merry hob with tradition.

One speaker on this panel talked about a weeding project she’d started at her library, requiring librarians to clean out the collections for more space and to prepare for more e-book use, and the results. Funnily enough, it has been traditionally held that weeding is healthy for collections, both to keep them up to date and to keep librarians intimately acquainted with the information under their charge. And the librarians who worked on this project reported exactly that: a more traditional relationship with their collection while preparing it for the future!

The truth is -- and this probably won't surprise you -- "the future" is a topic of some interest for librarians in general. It was also the focus of two other panels I attended in Anaheim. The more interesting of the two invited librarians from "innovative" libraries to talk about what they'd done that was so neat.

I started taking notes while watching the interpreter (I'm one of those lucky few who can write without looking at the tablet), but after a while, I stopped following the discussion so closely. It turns out that a lot of those innovative institutions are actually doing things that we've been doing here at Gallaudet for a while! We've done "bookmobiles," cell-phone-based scavenger hunts, reference over text messaging and IM, you name it.

So we're at about the right place on the curve when it comes to trying new things. We’re throwing quite a bit of support behind e-books and other electronic resources, like video streaming and open-access journals (which are open to the public), and adjusting the collection to account for the change. Our Web site is undergoing a major adjustment to reflect all of this, which is coming up soon. We’re snapping up interesting ideas that are coming our way, and figuring out how to put them into practice. We’ve been taking on teaching roles and getting out there. Not too bad!

I also went to a bunch of programs about information literacy and library building design. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, information literacy is pretty important to librarians. So is space planning, especially when it requires some creative thinking. I’ll write more about both in future posts, but it’s too hot outside to write much more right now!

Next week, I’ll get one of my colleagues to contribute their own thoughts about ALA, and a vlog may be coming your way!

Vlog review of Sula

Sula by Toni Morrison.

Vlog review of A Good American

A Good American by Alex George.

Vlog review of The Night Circus

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.

Vlog review of Three Science Fiction Novellas

Three Science Fiction Novellas by J.-H. Rosny aîné.

Vlog review of The Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin.

Review: Mr. Darwin's Shooter

So I’m sickish this week and because coughing would make a vlog more or less unpleasant, I’m going to review a book using words.

I just finished Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter and in spite of the title turning out to be enormously misleading, really enjoyed it.

It sounds like the book’s about a person who shot Charles Darwin. It’s actually about a person who shot for Charles Darwin; specifically, animals that Darwin subsequently used to formulate his theory of natural selection.

Syms Covington was a scion of a lower-class family that ran a tannery in Bedfordshire, England, in the early 19th Century. Religious by nature, he gets recruited by a traveling Congregational evangelist named Phipps, who makes his living as a sailor.

Leaving his family -- including a very loving stepmother -- at the age of twelve (his father allows this because competition from South America has depressed the local market for animal skins sufficiently that he can no longer afford to feed a growing boy), he joins Phipps on several voyages around the world.

The pair stick together for several years, but Phipps and Covington drift apart as Covington discovers the joys of being a globetrotting young man. Still, their relationship remains close, and they continue to work together, even after tragedy strikes both men.

By chance, this tragedy occurs just as their latest voyage is ready to leave harbor, aboard the good ship Beagle, which is setting off on a surveying mission under the direction of a gentleman naturalist named Charles Darwin.

Covington, being naturally curious and rather ambitious, immediately begins to jockey for the opportunity to serve Darwin in any capacity possible, and is ultimately successful. He starts out as a scribe for Darwin’s notes, translating the gent’s chicken-scratch into a very nice copperplate, and eventually begins to collect strange specimens from the New World and the Pacific Islands for himself. Over the course of the five-year voyage, he begins to lose his hearing and returns to England completely deaf.

Covington’s personal collection turns out to be a boon when the specimens collected by Darwin himself are damaged in transit to England; Covington’s set of finches is co-opted for study, which he not-so-graciously agrees to, and eventually, On the Origin of Species is published.

One problem: Covington is not mentioned anywhere in the book for his help in bringing in wild animals for study or even for the “donation” of his personal collection.

This is important because the book takes the form of a series of flashbacks coming to Covington as an old man in 1859. He’s grown old and wealthy, holding vast lands in Australia’s interior, with children and a wife. He serendipitously meets a young doctor in a small village near Sydney who saves his life and eventually …

Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.

In any case, it’s a fascinating look at not only a woefully-underexamined side of Darwin’s story, but also life in a great era of discovery. Although the official Age of Discovery had passed by the end of the 18th Century, the New World and Pacific Islands had only just begun to yield their biological wonders. Much of the Amazon had still not been mapped, and Australia alone still held many surprises.

You also get a very good idea of what it was like in those days of sailing, when you spent months at sea on a rickety wooden tub that was vulnerable to just about everything out there. There was no GPS, no radar or sonar, no radio, no entertainment or Internet or anything. Just long, hard work, questionable maps, and the stars.

I especially appreciated the way the story unfolded, switching between the life of the younger Covington and that of the same man long after his voyaging had ended. The evolution of his personality -- from brash young man to curmudgeonly geezer who can still outclimb most younger man -- is a lot of fun to watch.

Nevertheless, his bitterness and disappointment -- poor old guy -- at being underappreciated by Darwin and not being given credit for all the work he did despite an intense professional relationship that lasts for decades is hard to take, but adds a great deal of depth to his character. On the Origin of Species doesn’t arrive at his house until about halfway through the book, so the chapters about old Covington before that point include little details that betray his anxiety and anticipation; the chapters after that point really come down hard on his sense of betrayal and loss.

The language is also wonderful; it gets a little flowery at times, and the author slips into a kind of annoying habit of using sentence fragments to convey elements of the scene, but for the most part, it does a great job of getting the setting across. My favorite passage explains why the young doctor doesn’t think it odd that Covington collects small animals left and right in the wilds around Sydney:

There was a special pride among the takers of the place, because the plants and animals were so strange. Everything so queer and opposite. There must have been a separate act of Creation, it was maintained, and as Darwin had said on visiting there, to bring them into being. Swans were black. A mammal, the platypus, laid eggs, although nobody had ever seen one do it …

The fact that Covington goes deaf as an adult adds an interesting twist to how his particular personality copes with the world around him. He never learns to sign, of course, but lip-reads so well that the young doctor has no idea he’s understood every time he says something insulting Covington without making an effort to speak clearly.

In general, fantastic book. It’s a nice piece of historical fiction that reveals much about a relatively-simple theory that nevertheless completely transformed how we understand life itself. Strongly recommended.

Vlog review of 1Q84

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.

Vlog review of Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

How new books work

I’m going to swap out the vlogs for a bona-fide blog this week.

It’s been an interesting semester so far. I still can’t quite account for the fact that midterms are already coming next week.

Just what have I been doing? Well, stuff. Ordering books (not many movies, though, just yet -- I’m waiting for the spring DVD rush of films released during the holidays), coping with the cataloging challenges presented by some of those books, navigating the wilds of our e-books with anyone and everyone who’ll hear from me, getting our new Digital Campus service off the ground, and figuring out ways to work with the English Language Institute here on campus. I’ve also temporarily added inter-library loan processing to the list while our specialist is out for a few weeks. There’ll be another post on that new experience soon!

On an interesting note, someone who managed to walk into my office a week or two ago and noticed a new-book cart full of, well, new books, wanted to know exactly what it is that I do with them. The silly thing actually mentioned writing about it on the blog, because he thought it was always interesting to really get a look behind the scenes.

If you disagree, turn back now. Otherwise, abandon all hope.

We do the majority of our purchases through a single vendor with which we have a very good long-standing relationship. They take care of just about everything for us, from providing information about each book to load into the catalog, to putting the barcode sticker on the front of the book. They’re a major time-saver.

9 times out of 10, new books arrive in perfect shape and head straight to the shelves within a week of arriving. The rest of the time is where I come in.

Sometimes the record loaded doesn’t include enough information (a frequent-enough occurrence for less-mainstream titles like She seized the balls), or sometimes the systems involved get a little confused about what goes where. The end result is usually a record that only has the title and ISBN number (that mess of 13 digits you usually see above the barcode on a book’s back cover), or a record that’s really fine, it just needs a little extra information. Other times, the source of those records -- a national database of published items associated with the Library of Congress -- just has a weird call number we can’t use because the library that created the original record uses a different system.

In case you’re curious, the most common wrong-call-number issue we deal with involves biographies. Lots of public libraries tend to just put “B” for “biography” on the spine and alphabetize by the last name of the person the book’s about.

We always use Dewey, of course. When any of the above happens to a given book, I hunt down the information we need and add it to the record. Sometimes it’s easy -- the national database may have what I need, just in a different version of the same item -- other times it’s hard, like when there are no Dewey call numbers available for a particular book. Then I have to make it up from scratch, using a set of four ridiculously-complicated books that include instructions like:

“Add to each subdivision identified by * the numbers following the numbers following 671 in 671.2-671.8, e.g., welding aluminum 673.72252.”

Or:

“Add to 01 the numbers following 781 in 781.1-781.5, e.g., Spanish folk music for springtime 781.6261015242, rhythm in Spanish folk music for springtime 781.62610152421224.”

These are unusual cases, I admit; it isn’t often you see a sentence that says, “the numbers following the numbers following …” or call numbers that are 17 digits long focusing on a specific aspect of a specific type of folk music used during a specific time of year.

These cataloging issues are relatively rare. Out of a cart of 90 books or so, we’ll pull maybe four or five. Once or twice a year, the systems involved decide to stop speaking to each other -- maybe the Consortium just so happens to shut our system down for maintenance, or the Sun gets trigger-happy -- so we’ll get a cartload or two of books that apparently don’t exist. Fortunately, there’s some redundancy built in, like weekly updates that include downloadable packages of records that we can load manually fairly easily.

Sometimes we order books and films from Amazon because they aren’t available through our primary vendor, and those arrive completely naked. No record, no physical processing, nothing. For those, I grab the records from the same national database, check them over for accuracy, double-check the call number, and load them into the catalog. Then they’re physically processed and come back out, ready for shelving.

It probably sounds like a bunch of things that can go wrong, but truthfully, that’s the only thing I really need to do: deal with what goes wrong. It’s a testament to the services we use that it’s rare enough to leave me time for all the other things I do.

Next week, you’ll get another vlog, just as soon as I decide which “classic” to review. I also take requests; just e-mail me or post a comment!

Vlog review of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Vlog review of A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

We're back with some new books!

I’m applying the defibrillators to this blog.

It’s been over a month since the last post. There are a few reasons for this, including a two-week vacation, a new semester to prepare for, a dearth of time to read for the vlog, and the sheer number of new books coming in.

So I offer this post up as an apology for my neglectful ways. It’s a return to tradition: New book cart!

Truthfully, they aren’t all that new, and I plan to only cover the three that have stuck in my mind the most. Here we go ...

11/22/63 by Stephen King
Stephen King is one of those writers who’s so much a part of our culture that each new book he produces is an Event-with-a-capital-E, regardless of how good it may or may not be. His output took a wrong turn sometime in the mid-1990s, but has since bounced back with new creepfests like Duma Key. This upturn continues with 11/22/63, which anyone over the age of 45 and history buffs knows is the date of the Kennedy assassination.

Actually, this book is interesting in a number of ways. It’s less horrific than the work he’s known for and seems to encompass a few new themes. A GED teacher finds out that a local friend who owns a diner has discovered a portal to 1958 in his storeroom. Together, they come up with a plan to avert the Kennedy assassination. Since the other side of the portal is anchored five years before then, it’s a long plan indeed. Fascinating idea, and a terrific execution (no pun intended). Bonus points for a significant librarian character!

Erasure by Percival Everett
An under-the-surface evaluation of exploitative publishing, this novel follows the story of a fairly-successful African-American author who’s spent a few years being rejected by publisher after publisher. The dissolution of his success and its fallout, including an elderly mother who needs care that he can no longer afford, is made all the worse by a best-selling novel by an African-American woman who rides the life out of every stereotype in the book.

In response to this injustice -- why is this minstrel show so successful when his own work can’t get published? -- he writes what he thinks is a scathing parody called My Pafology, but which a publisher and, eventually, the world, think is a hugely-popular bestseller. As our main character becomes wealthier and wealthier, he struggles with the ethics involved in exploiting prejudices without seeking to break them down, and the darker side of popular entertainment. This book manages to be wickedly funny, cringe-inducing, and above all, thought-provoking.

Mrs. Nixon: A novelist imagines a life by Ann Beattie
I suppose this book should come with a disclaimer: Don’t read it if you’re a history buff. Beattie writes what amounts to a fictionalized biography, which is to say it’s not actually a biography. It’s a story about Pat Nixon and the life Beattie imagines she may have led as Richard Nixon’s wife through every scandal and misdeed that plagued his administration and marriage.

In general, Beattie doesn’t worry too much about historical accuracy; she based most of the story on already-extant published sources instead of personal papers that would have revealed insights into the First Lady's interior world. She also doesn’t worry about writing a conventional novel; the book reads like a collection of short stories starring the same main character, interspersed with Beattie’s own examination of the craft of writing itself. The result is interesting because you come away with the sense that there are really three main characters in the book: both Nixons and Beattie herself.

That about covers it for the moment! More to come next week.

Vlog review of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu.