Matthew Reidsma mreidsma

Allow Users to Report Problematic Summon Topic Explorer Entries

Summon's Topic Explorer shows relevant reference material in the right-hand pane to users doing broad searches. The location of this content is getting more useful as Google adds more and more features to it's Knowledge Graph, which shows relevant information (including reference content, store hours and traffic, content from Gmail and calendar and more). In the past, the right-hand side of a page was largely ignored by users, since it was the home of banner ads and other useless bits of content (and it still is in many places). But Google's push to take back the right side pane means our users are more and more likely to see content there, especially when searching. So it's never more import

Everyone is a Distance Learner

More and more essential library services are moving to the web - and yet it is the rare library website that is designed for users who never set foot in the physical library. Despite the current emphasis on modernizing library spaces with 21st century furniture, cafes, and gizmos and sensors in every nook and cranny, we're missing an opportunity. By making sure that our online tools are tailored to help true distance learners - those users who cannot visit our physical spaces - we'll not only live up to the Access Entitlement Principle, but we'll make libraries better for everyone.

Algorithmic Gender Bias in Discovery Systems

This is a working draft of a possible future blog post

At GVSU, we used the Summon discovery service to provide search across most of our resources. One of Summon 2.0's features is the "Topic Explorer," a sidebar that provides general reference information when a search is done. The Topic Explorer shows short excerpts from Reference Sources, including Wikipedia, when a search meets certain criteria. From the Summon Press Release announcing Summon 2.0 in 2013:

Developed by analyzing global Summon usage data and leveraging commercial and open access reference content, as well as librarian expertise, this new feature helps users get started (presearch) with the research process and allows librarians to help users when and where they need it most.

The Topic Explorer returns different reference articles about the superhero "batman," for instance, depend

LIS Journal Editorial Position Titles

The following are journals where GVSU Library faculty have published articles (as of 2015 portfolios).

Journal Name	Editor Title
Journal of Librarianship & Scholarly Communications	2 Editors-in-chief
Journal of Academic Librarianship	Editor-in-chief
Journal of Education in Library and Information Science	Editor
LOEX Quarterly	Managing Editor

In III's terrible OPAC, WebPAC Pro, the Advanced Search screen has all these little nested tables that just hold one label in a table cell and an imput in another. There is no reason they should be tables! So I wrapped each of the tokens in the Web Master with an id, and then wrote this silly function to remove the table markup and just give me labels and form elements. Then I used CSS to make it look the way it should, since this is 2015 and not 1997.

The fact that I had to write this function boggles my mind.

	$('table.bib_links').find('a').each(function() {

	var eBookArray = Array('proquest.safaribooksonline.com');

	// Get part of URL after ezproxy
	var ezpUrl = $(this).attr('href');
	var providerArray = ezpUrl.split('/');
	console.log(providerArray[5]);
	if(eBookArray.indexOf(providerArray[5]) !== -1) {

	<?php
	/*
	This script helped me generate sample results for an exercise in my forthcoming book
	on Customizing Library Vendor interfaces. It might be useful as a starting point
	if you ever need to generate a database full of random searches
	*/

	// Set the number of times the loop should run (how many rows will be generated?)
	$x = 500;

	<?php

	// Requires the simple html dom parser
	include ('simple_html_dom.php');

	$html = file_get_html('http://gvsu.edu/library/hours.htm');
	$i = 0;

	echo '<ul id="realtime-hours">';