Earlier this week, I spent three very enjoyable days in Edinburgh at UKSG (tag uksg10), the UK Serials Group conference which brings together librarians and vendors of journal subscriptions and discovery services.
Walking round the exhibition, a couple of things jumped out at me. Firstly, a lot of the search/discovery interfaces that various vendors were pushing are still not really doing much on the relevancy/results ranking front or personal recommendations (for some of my previous thoughts on this, see OPAC Ground Truth… and for some ideas about new ranking factors see
JISC MOSAIC Competition Entries – Imaginings Around the Use of Library Loans Data ). Everyone was happy to show me their advanced search interface forms, though…. (which gets a personal yawn from me… If I want to use an advanced search, I’ll usually drop a limit tag into the search box, or hack the URL. For advanced searching, I guess I prefer command line to a form!;-)
The second thing that jumped out at me was the lack of technical knowledge on the part of the vendors and some of the buyers. “Is there an API for that?” is not, apparently, polite conversation in such circles…
As ever, the conversation is what makes an event, and I’ll try to pop a few notes about some of the conversations I found myself in over the next few days. But for now, here are the slides I used in my (rather rushed) presentation…
As ever, I guess you had to be there…
OUseful.Info, the blog... 