Past topics have included Integration of Local Content and Metadata in Encore and, most recently, Unlocking the Full Power of Your Library with Encore Synergy.

If you want to learn more about the Encore Webinar Series please write the Encore Team.

Northwest Oregon’s Multnomah County Library (MCL) operates in a "high-volume" environment. Not only in terms of the number of book volumes, but in the sheer volume of user activity. With up to 240,000 holds in the Millennium system at a given time, across 19 locations and 400 square miles, smart staffing choices and optimization of workflow are crucial for library staff. With an eye toward ever-improving service through better information, MCL has joined with Innovative as a development partner for Encore Reporter.

This new product brings the power and sophistication of Encore to the business of libraries, featuring the latest visual display and discovery tools such as maps and facets and driven by a new, underlying multi-dimensional data structure. Encore Reporter harvests Millennium ILS data to provide statistics that cover a wide range of library operations and user activity— from patron activity, to circulation, to e-journals, to expenditures, and more.

Encore Reporter displaying Google Maps™ mash up of a Zip Code Map displaying 2009 to-date circulation data. Mouse-over image displays circulation of 398,747 for the 92730 ZIP code during this period.

Although library staff "slice and dice data" across many axes just by clicking facets—for literally hundreds of options at a glance—a number of data-sets proved immediately useful to staff. For example, Encore Reporter provides a Transaction Location Trends Report filtered by location. Says Steve Casburn, ILS Coordinator: "As a multi-branch library, this is a huge situation for us. Essentially, we need to know what location did the item come from that is being checked out at given location. This tells us how items are being moved about the system as they are used."

Library staff know that it takes more staff time to process a hold than to just do a checkout of a book already on the shelves. Clicking another facet on the same Transaction Location Trends Report limited by holds-filled exposes this information quickly. Says Casburn: “Knowing the locations where users commonly pick up items lets us make the right staffing choices. It is a fantastic number to make decisions with.”

The most visually arresting feature of Encore Reporter is the Google Maps™ mash-up (pictured). "The ZIP Code Maps Report gives us a clear and simple overview of where our patrons live. When we click the location facet we can see where people are coming from to each location. An example of how that helps us: Many of our patrons live outside the county and use our library via reciprocal borrowing agreements. For our branches near the county lines, we can see how many patrons are coming to them from outside the county and where exactly they are coming from. That’s cool." At present, sixteen libraries, divided equally among public and academic institutions, are part of the Encore development partnership, ensuring there will be options
of value to any type of library.

Learn more about Encore Reporter.

“We have a new ethics center on campus that wanted a library collection for the center. Instead of trying to create another branch library, we introduced them to tagging in Encore. They have now tagged over 300 books with the tag ‘Ethics Center’ so when you search under that term you get materials on applied ethics and the teaching of ethics – subjects that are difficult to search in traditional subject headings without using a lot of terms. Tagging is a way to create a specialized collection that is virtual and easy to find.”

See for yourself in this search for ethics center on UNL’s Encore implementation.

Dee Ann Allison, Professor & Director COR Services, tells us: “None of this participation is creating extra work for the staff. We haven’t had to delete one of the hundreds of community tags yet. Some of them may look a little weird and you might not know what they mean–’alien weeds’ for example–but they are clearly valuable to some of our users. In this case those users turn out to be to agriculture students studying invasive plant species.”

Participation is powerful! There’s more to be found about community tagging on the Encore website.

Encore is a modern tool for easy discovery of anything your library wants to offer, and, by extension, it is an easy way to promote aspects of the collections that are truly local. An particularly “earthy” example is St. Lawrence University Library’s (NY) pilot project to build, digitize and then harvest a special collection into Encore called Back to the Land Movement in St. Lawrence County (1960-Present). The Dublin Core metadata that will be harvested is an ideal format for easy discovery by users and deployment into a variety of contexts such as OAIster and Innovative’s Encore discovery platform.

Starting four decades ago, St. Lawrence County was one of dozens of rural destinations in the US to attract the attention of “back-to-the-landers,” a broad movement of mostly young people seeking anti-materialistic lifestyles in rural settings. The back-to-the-landers established communes and individual homesteads, experimented with alternatives to the cash economy, and tried to sustain themselves through farming and other land-based ventures. Over the years, they also became engaged citizens of the county, greatly influencing public life in the region.

Three key components of the digital archival project are to search the published record for citations; conduct fieldwork in St. Lawrence County; and invite those associated with the back-to-the-land community to submit copies of their own photographs, journals, and newsletters for inclusion into the collection. The collection will consist of 3,000-4,000 items such as journals, books, newsletters, ephemera, recorded interviews, and photographs created by back-to-the-landers in the county and by those who have documented this movement.

Says Bart Harloe, University Librarian: “Despite the great significance of back-to-the-landers to the history and culture of St. Lawrence County, no systematic effort has ever been made to assemble a research collection on the subject. The partners in this project aim to amass as complete a record of this population as possible.”

The collection is just one of three harvesting projects that also include the Dwight P. Church Photography Collection and Nsukka Artists and Contemporary Nigerian Art Collection. The latter fits perfectly with the curricula offered through St. Lawrence University’s African Studies program and Kenya Study Abroad program. Each entails bringing OAI-compliant metadata into the Encore catalog, side by side with e-journals and book titles.

Harloe continues: “An Encore search will provide a very good picture of what kinds of resources are available, their history and strengths, and a one-step search for articles across the various disciplines. The addition of these three collections, including Back to the Land, is going to blend in as a bellwether of our contribution to the campus and integral to teaching and research.”

Encore quite simply offers up the best from the world of information, plus the ability to bring local collections in the mix that bring folks back to the library, literally and figuratively. In the case of St. Lawrence University…Back to the Land and back to the library!

Find out more about Encore Harvesting Services.

]]> http://encoreforlibraries.com/2009/09/11/oai-pmh-harvesting-at-st-lawrence-university-library-ny/feed 0 http://encoreforlibraries.com/2009/07/30/washington-college-of-law-dc-joins-encore-reporter-development http://encoreforlibraries.com/2009/07/30/washington-college-of-law-dc-joins-encore-reporter-development#comments Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:50:50 +0000 Spenser Thompson http://encoreforlibraries.com/?p=653 July 30, 2009

Washington College of Law has become a development partner for Encore Reporter. An exciting new product from Innovative, Encore Reporter provides complete next-generation reporting on the data libraries need most. Encore Reporter provides dynamic and visually elegant reports on key performance indicators, operational statistics, patron and material usage analysis, print and e-resource usage, collection development, and more.

Billie Jo Kaufman, Associate Dean for Library and Information Resources at Washington College of Law, states: “As a Chair of the American Bar Association’s Committee on Libraries, I know it is important to get the right statistics, and get them easily, in the format that funders and other organizations want. What Encore Reporter will do is to present our data and allow us to see it from a number of angles that will give us more and better information. Essentially, we will get more out of the data that we put in the system, in terms of content, and how it is used.”

Encore Reporter is now a project that benefits from the participation of public and academic libraries, in order to give libraries, no matter their type, multi-dimensional and relevant data they need to succeed and improve operations. For more information on Encore Reporter click the Encore Reporter tag.

Learn more about Law School Libraries.

Plugging In

As a first step towards launching Encore, Henry Er of the Encore Service Team configured a new server loaded with the Library’s catalog data and shipped it off. All library staff had to do was open the box and pop in a cable. “The work was minimal to get Encore live and it gives our users a big payoff,” says Susan Jones, Department Librarian of Automated Services Bureau. “We had some back and forth with the Encore Team and in a half-day we were up and running.”

While Susan has been involved in a bringing up a complement of new Innovative products that LPBL selected over the last 18 months, Julianna kept an eye out for user needs and made suggestions about configuration. For example, if you launch an Encore search at LBPL, you will see results from a federated search of their databases at the top right of the screen. Like many public libraries, LBPL has invested in database subscriptions to give them a resource of high-quality, trusted information. Julianna says: “We not only made federated search available in Encore, but also put the results front and center because we want people to be able to easily access reliable information and use it frequently.”

Tagging-Including the Library Staff!

Julianna has seen the first uses of Community Tagging by patrons, watching them come through in Encore’s Community Manager tool. Tags are not just for patrons at LBPL – the library staff are making rich contributions as well. Librarians are adding tags to group together items of interest and leverage the pathfinders they’ve already created. “We have librarians in the children’s department tagging items ‘readalouds’, which become a facet in searches.” Librarians across the library are thinking about lists, such as New York Times or Los Angeles Times bestsellers, or titles from the Brown Bag Book Club, as possible new tagging targets.

“We chose Encore because we need technologies that are actually working in the field for libraries, rather than products that are promised or years away from being stable,” says Sloan Sakamoto, Manager of LBPL’s Automated Services Bureau. The speed of the implementation means LBPL staff has bragging rights in the region, having punched Encore 3.0 live before a cross-town academic library did. Says Julianna: “We’re proud of being ahead of the curve and the Encore Team helped us get there.”

About 40 staff members from various departments gathered in a library conference room for the event. Holly Murphy, Systems Librarian, Encore Services, gave a two-hour, interactive presentation fielded questions from reference, cataloging, and systems staff on everything from facets to Encore’s RightResult^TM search algorithm. Among those present were Garrett Kuramoto, Reference Librarian, and Marsha Pollak, Supervising Librarian for Cataloging and Processing.

Top: (l to r) Holly Murphy, Systems Librarian; Stephanie Dal Pra, Technical Lead; Henry Er, Systems Engineer; Marsha Pollak, Garrett Kuramoto; Tim Healy, Systems Librarian; Vince Briggeman, Senior Systems Librarian; Luis Cosmes, Manager, Encore Services. Bottom left: Encore demo session. Bottom right: Encore Launch Kit materials.

No launch event would be complete without the presentation of Encore T-shirts, buttons, and promotional posters to staff, to help them spread the word to library users. Marsha showed her generosity by cooking up one of her signature chocolate creations with the “Encore” written on top!

An Encore launch event says a lot about the product and the people behind it, a nimble team that dedicates themselves completely to Encore and provides wall-to-wall service from set-up, to the launch event, to support every step of the way. After the launch event all library staff needs to say is “make it live”! You can check out Sunnyvale’s implementation clicking here.

The Encore Team welcomes Sunnyvale Public Library to the Encore family!

RightResult^TM is a trademark of Innovative Interfaces, Inc.

Setting the Stage

Quinnipiac’s Systems Librarian Terry Ballard already had the HTML in place to put Encore forward as the library’s default keyword search. The Encore search screen is simply an HTML form that you can embed wherever you wish—library homepage, WebPAC Pro front page, wherever—so completing the HTML ahead of time goes a long way toward a speedy transition.

The installation of Encore was quick—just two hours—and our staff was absolutely thrilled with the implementation from the get-go.

Terry Ballard
Academic Systems Librarian
Quinnipiac University (CT)

Up and Running

Although install times do vary, Encore Services strives to bring a “no fuss” installation to your library. Typically the Encore “Pit Crew” can get you up and running in a day. The Encore Services team even concludes each launch event with an on-site presentation to staff. That’s all the training Encore requires.

It’s fascinating to see how print, archival, and electronic resources fold together in Encore. Our materials are spread across four data platforms but are brought together in a single Encore search.

Dee Ann Allison
Professor and Director of Computing
Operations and Research Services
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

See for yourself

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln library staff continues to harvest new collections into Encore, including their Digital Commons™ institutional repository of faculty-created research, images from art and architecture courses, the Lewis and Clark Journals, and the Walt Whitman Archive. UNL is a Harvester trailblazer. Other harvesting projects are in the works. Stay tuned or check out their Encore implementation first hand.