“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.

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.”

With community tagging, Encore invites users to participate in the discovery process in a whole new way. Now library staff and users alike can add tags that enrich descriptive materials, making it easier to find and understand library holdings. For example, staff of the Ethics Center at University of Nebraska-Lincoln gave over 300 books the tag “Ethics Center.” When you search Encore for 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. See for yourself in this search for ethics center on UNL’s Encore implementation!

Specialization Made Easy

Ditto with emerging and specialized terms. Anyone who’s concerned about how to behave in cyberspace (and aren’t we all?) would surely want materials addressing that topic to be tagged with the word “netiquette.” And for the medical specialist, a general search using the term “dermatology” may or may not reveal the debate, spreading like a rash among dermatologists, about what to call the examination of skin lesions using a dermatoscope. Is it dermatoscopy or dermoscopy, or simply epiluminescence microscopy? You or I may not care, but these specialized tags help select communities benefit from their knowledge and get the most out of your library’s catalog.