Posted by Mia in Collections, ERM Module.
Tags: ERM
It’s the embargo wildebeest!! It isn’t that I’m such a nut for precision, but really, this whole thing is so flaky it’s absolutely unreal.
First, the publisher communicates to a provider that such and such a title is embargoed for a certain period. That information first has to be sent to Serials Solutions by the provider (e.g. Ebsco, for the titles in ASP). That process has to happen for every title. Multiply by every provider.
Just reflect on that for a moment …
Then there is the Serials Solutions cut-off date, which means that whatever publishers or aggregators haven‘t transmitted the info to SerSol, or if SerSol hasn’t gotten to it, will miss out on that production cycle iteration.
Next, it has to be massaged by Serials Solutions for each customer — that takes place over a duration of about a week to 10 days.
After that, the files are transmitted, only once a month, to all the libraries who are customers.
Now we get into all the local glitches, throughput processes, and bottlenecks.
Do we actually think this works?
Facets
April 1, 2008
Posted by Mia in FRBR, Frontiers.
Tags: tags, facets
Facets are for everyone, not just power users (see wordtools discussion on ngc4lib). Facets should reveal clusters (aspects of things which have been collocated due to their “like-ness”) which a priori could not be articulated (or simply were not articulated) in advance. Power users are also novice searchers when they are in unfamiliar or new domains.
Humans recognize like things. The example Karen mentioned about everyone named “Mia” (admittedly, I rather liked this example) getting indexed along with “Manila International Airport” is of course mixing persons with airports. But what if the system instead returned known clusters in predetermined facets, for sake of argument, the facets “airports” and “persons”, with some kind of heuristics e.g. “more like this?”
Facets should enable the user to recognize some familiar elements in what could possibly be (doesn’t need to be, though) an unfamiliar landscape. They are an orientation device that helps you navigate in the space. If I’m “in too close” to a term and lack sufficient context to recognize any familiar part of the landscape, I should be able to telescope out to a higher level of abstraction until I reach some level (facet) that I do recognize. Maybe I won’t recognize it until I reach the “animal-vegetable-mineral” level; so be it.
For me, not employing facets is kind of like not having enough pixels on the screen sufficient to resolve into a recognizable image. I can’t “see” where I am in the landscape.
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