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AW,
Look What They’ve Done to Our Links, Ma
Péter's
Picks & Pans Online 27(4) July/August, 2003 |
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I know that many have shared my experience, and some even
posted their thoughts in the What Were They Thinking thread on the JESSE
listserv about the new
ALA Website (AW).
ALA chose to celebrate the
National Library Week with
the launch of AW. In the eyes of most visitors it must have been the Week of Frustrations, Failures and Fiascos.
I presume someone will write a very scholarly article about
AW (which may get published as early as 2004), but as a die-hard educator,
I would like to show you a little broader and deeper panorama with many
illustrative screenshots about the
new AW right now as you experience it, and
also to tell you what was I thinking about AW and the overall
digital attitude of ALA. Maybe, it can be used as a backgrounder
for creating those boilerplate petitions for members, to lobby ALA
to reconsider AW and its digital strategy.
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What Was I Thinking (and Hoping)?
It is quite discouraging that while ALA has published so many
good books and journal articles in some of the best and most affordable
scholarly journals of our profession about systems analysis, Web site
design, information service and database evaluation, it does not practice
what it preaches. I present a short summary first for those who battle
with ADD, then I proceed with the detailed and illustrated review.
Links to external sites are marked in conventional blue, and they
open in a new window. Jump links to sections within this document are marked
with green for those who don’t want to read through this piece but would
rather go cherrypicking from this introductory part.
Presenting the new AW struck me as if a dietetic nurse would
pontificate about health issues over munching a Big Mac with extra cheese
and mayo, or as the Hungarian saying puts it succinctly: preaching water,
drinking wine.
As a starter, I hoped that the new AW would finally offer the
full text digital archives of ALA journals for subscribers (maybe
for some extra charge), and a database of their abstracts free for anyone as so
many publishers have been doing this
(including all the major players in the scholarly field of library and
information science except for the Haworth Press). You find among them
not only the non-profit ones but also the largest commercial
publishers which are not exactly known for “donatious” attitude.
What I saw at first, instead, was the (hopefully temporary) disappearance of the free table
of contents, abstracts and selective full-text articles from 19
volumes of Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL),
all the back issues of Journal of Library Automation (JOLA),
and all the volumes of Reference and User Services Quarterly
(RUSQ), except for a current issue with a grand total of three
abstracts - just to
mention some of my favorite ALA journals. Many more sources have
not made the transition to the new AW.
For fairness, two of my other favorites, College and
Research Libraries and College & Research Libraries News,
mostly survived the reorganization (from content perspective), although
the latter is missing the 1994 and 1995 volumes which were available
earlier.
The access perspective, however, is another question.
I thought and hoped that the new AW would sport
digital
object identifiers (DOIs), as do
more than 8 million scholarly articles, published in primary documents of
more than 200 publishers. The International DOI Foundation did an
excellent job in spreading the gospel, and working with rival publishers,
which is like herding cats. Using DOI could have offered an
elegant and lasting solution instead of
the current chaos which
cripples tens of thousands of existing links to
previous AW destinations, and may happen at the next
reorganization.
My estimate is higher than the number floated around in
messages last week, which have not considered the many links to ALA
journals and other ALA sites from publishers' and aggregators'
abstracting/indexing and full-text archives. In the
long run this will annoy many more users of the new AW in lack of
decent and comprehensive redirects with the exception of some of the high
level ALA sites. H.W. Wilson which has done an utterly professional job
in verifying, cleaning up and consolidating URLs in the journals it covers
is probably the hardest hit by the below the belt punches (or should I
call them Tysonian ear bites) of ALA
I hoped that new AW will have a much better
search engine
than the old AW. Instead, the new search engine seems to experience a
tsunami of senior moments at best. The
page which could be seen the most often when clicking on an existing link,
was an error message to which I just refer to for a
shorthand as the Sorry! page.
It counsels users by telling them to
use the advanced search page (which should be
called “disadvanced” search page) , or to navigate using the site map (which is more like a site
gazetteer), or call the help desk.
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It’s not easy to decide which one of the three is
the most frustrating. The first two options I will discuss and illustrate
in detail below. As for the
third: it is impossible to
get through to a live person at the given extension, but a voice recording
assures you that they will come back to you within 3 business days with an
answer, although it may not be the URL
of the new location as many pages have been left behind or lost in the
hectic move).
If the help desk can tell you the new URL, have much
patience, a clear phone line, and a large piece of paper ready. For
example, what used to be http://www.ala.org/ascla/charl.html
for a useful document about how to make the ACRL conference on a
shoestring, has been transformed into the URL shown below when AW was
launched, just when participants were
preparing for the conference trip. They must have had fun trying to jot it
down while on the phone with the help desk people, then type it in with the correct number
of underscores
http://www.ala.org/Content/NavigationMenu/ACRL/Publications/College_and_Research_Libraries_
News/Back_Issues__2002/October/Charlotte_on_a_shoestring.htm
The query charlotte shoestring
did not find it, but gave a not exactly warm and fuzzy error message shown
below. (There is
no help file about the search syntax to learn that space between words
means exact phrase, but this is not the only reason why it would be
premature to consider AW for an ASCLA award for excellence in
accessibility. In case you go to Charlotte for some other event click
here
for that piece.)
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Week of Festivities (and Frustrations, Failures and Fiascos)
ALA
knew that the National Library Week is coming (as it has been for 55 years),
and probably wanted to deliver a gift, but as will become obvious it
was way behind with
finalizing the new site. Still, it kicked off the week on April 6th
with the launch of the new AW. I wish it had waited for the next anniversary. It’s not only that the wrapping is less than careful, it
is the whole package that seems to be
a kick in the face of most visitors, and basic systems design
rules.
I
kicked off our 30th wedding anniversary celebrations the same
day. While I am often a
dollar short and a day late with anniversaries and festive occasions, I
knew that this day would be coming, so I ordered ahead of time the special kukui
nut lei, sneaked out, picked it up early morning, and with some little
other gifts and a personal card I could almost show up on time with these
and the breakfast tray. I was not perfect, I never am, but I think I was
better than ALA with organizing the week of festivities. (Yes, I know that
sweet pea is the “official” flower, pearl or ivory the appropriate
jewelry, and Hallmark the authorized supplier of all kinds of cards with
cliché sentences for 30th wedding anniversaries).
Sure
AW was (or will be) a surprise gift for all of us who created the tens of
thousands of links to the old
AW in the past few years, as well as for the users who will click on the
now dead links. Sure, this reorganization was an ill-timed and very bad
(gift) idea, given the massively dysfunctional nature of the new
AW.
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I
can’t give you exact numbers how many links there are to the various old
AW sites, but the obvious check provides only a rough estimate, much lower
than the real number of casualties. Google claims 22,900 links to www.ala.org,
Alexa’s number is 18,340. AllTheWeb’s number is so off-the-wall that I
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More
to dead links than meets the eyes
There
are many more sources linking
to the old AW than the above search results may suggest. For example,
there are a great number of
articles in the digital versions of
LIS journals which provide links in the text or in the endnotes
to the selectively published full-text
articles of various
ALA Division journals, and/or
to ALA
websites. These are not visible at all for any of the Web-wide search
engines as they are in password protected sites and displayed only in
response to actual queries. Here is an in-text reference from the Journal
of Academic Librarianship to an ACRL website, and the response to the
link (after I removed the closing parenthesis that should have been done
by the copy editors who probably were too busy checking the compliance
with their punctuation guidelines where it does not matter, and time and again
overlooked, or may have added lethal HTML punctuation errors, sacrificing
access at the altar of
publishers’ style sheets). |
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Click
for larger screenshot! |
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This
is what happens with an endnote link
from Serials Review to an article in the ALCTS Newsletter |
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Click
for larger screenshot! |
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Aggregators
are also hit hard by this reckless reorganization, and H.W. Wilson would
be right to call it a below the belt hit. Why? Because H.W. Wilson had
done the most of every content providers that I know to verify, correct
and consolidate in a special field the URLs mentioned by the authors.
Scholarly publishers could take a page or two from H. W. Wilson's book on
how to cite URLs. In the example below two of the three links from
an article to ALA sites bring up the dreaded Sorry! page.
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Bibliographies
and reading lists of various LIS courses which link not only to the
full-text articles mentioned above but -in order to enhance those reading
lists- also to abstracts scattered at various sites of the old AW. Until the
launch of the new AW such
links of mine as shown below worked fine, bringing up the
appropriate abstract or full text available at various sites - ALA being
one of them. |
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The
big problem is not that we have to change the reasonable URLs to the
anaconda URLs of the
new AW (although some browsers just crash when encountering
such monsters like this one
http://www.lita.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Our_Association/Divisions/LITA/LITA_Publications4/ITAL__
Information_Technology_and_Libraries/Volume_21,_No__2,_June_2002.htm#anchor261182
The
big problem is to identify all our links to all the old AW sites in
various sources we have access to with modification rights, and then to find their new location.
Tracking down your
high school flame who moved to the Middle East is easier. If you believe that a few quick search at the
new AW would quickly locate the new address of the linked documents, you
obviously have not tried the search engine of the new AW (more about it
later). Of course, I am just an amateur, but if it were easy, wouldn’t
you expect that the designers could have replaced at least those links
from within ALA announcements which link to ALA sites not valid anymore?
Here is an example from an ALA News Release: |
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and
here is the result which you will see ad nauseam, on the
infamous Sorry! pages,
many off them triggered by other ALA
sites.
Click
for larger screenshot! |
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An
even less obvious problem is that the estimates
of 20,000 dead links do not include either the links to the
ALA sites which start not with www.ala.org
but with some other primary domain names affected by the reorganization. For example, all the issues of ITAL
(and its predecessor, JOLA) start with www.lita.org.
At first blush it is not that many (about 1,600 which are visible for
Web-wide search engines).
There
is an even bigger problem. Nothing
can be done with the many in-text and endnote links in the articles and
conference papers which have been published in the publishers' archives,
and in the abstracting and indexing and full-text databases of Gale, UMI,
EBSCO and H.W. Wilson. They can't be expected to go back and change them.
Now,
start identifying all these other (non-www.ala.org) URLs, and determine the number of links to
them in order to get another estimate for a more realistic number of
dead links. Then, guessstimate the number of links from the publishers' and
aggregators archives which are not visible for the Web-wide search engines, to have a sense for the real loss, and e-mail
me in the morning. To soften the blow, I can tell you that some sources
escaped the reorganization mess, such as the ALA bookstore.
The
Little Search Engine That Couldn’t
The
launch of the new web site at
the beginning of the National Library Week and its condition
throughout the week was
akin to your spouse coming
home most of the days drunk, first just navigating through the rooms
erratically, then searching endlessly for but not
finding even his wedding ring, let alone the gifts, then sobering
up for a short time, followed by a period of painfully long pauses before
answering questions, then not responding to inquiries, then just conking
out like teenagers after binge drinking and messing up their hotel room on
a Spring Break in Cancún. Not exactly one’s dream of a week of
festivities, especially after we were promised a rose garden by the ALA
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At
the beginning of the National Library Week, the search engine could not
return much useful information. The simple search then wised up a little
bit, although it remained enigmatic, not revealing, for example,
how many hits it found. Neither made it any sense why
many hits appeared twice or more times in the result list when they
seemed to take you to the very same page. Yes, the second item one has the
acronym in the page title, but no difference otherwise. |
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The
URLs are so long that they always run off the address cell, and can’t be
read, but after I could capture them and paste into a page, I could see a
difference between the two URLs, but not a justification for
getting to the seemingly same target page. |
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Often,
the software
did not respond for so long that the system got
timed out repeatedly, and I started to make snapshots while waiting
and waiting and waiting. |
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I
have a nice collection of being refused access to http://www.ala.org using
different browsers at different times. For space reason I show here only
my Mozilla and Opera efforts. |
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MIA
or DOA
Once
I could get through, the software simply refused to give an answer to a
dozen of known item searches when I tried to estimate the damage and check
some of my links to one of my test journals, ITAL:
Information Technology and Libraries. After much trials and
tribulations, I learned that Volumes 1-19 of ITAL are not yet
available on the site. They were in the old AW, and I have links to
several of the editorials and other full text articles, as well as to
informative abstracts. They are now dead, and even if I navigate to the new location
of ITAL they are not there, so I can't replace the dead links. |
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JOLA’s
Tables of Contents and selective abstracts were on the old AW (as shown by
the Google cache result), and the new AW is "pleased to be able to
offer the Tables of of Contents and many abstracts" but you would not
be pleased because it ain't as I write this. JOLA may seem to be ancient but many of
its articles from the late 1970s when I was up to my neck in library automation
projects are still more relevant and insightful than some of the most
current articles. |
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I have seen
significant omission also for another journal's
abstracts which I use in my links, the Reference and User Services
Quarterly (RUSQ). In the old AW all issues were accessible through the RUSA
page from the first issue after the title change from RQ
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The RUSA page on the new AW offers a grand total of 3 abstracts
from a current issue. That's it. Another missing in action journal even
after the National Library Week.
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I
found out these –hopefully temporary- omissions and MIAs when the last
item from my checklist for ITAL
(the one about Multimedia Research Support shown earlier) finally was
found by the search engine. I could recognize it from the single
item hit list only because of the familiar volume and issue number, not
because of the summary excerpt shown by the software. It is not from the
abstract of the article I was searching for. |
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It
turned out to be the Table of Contents and Abstracts page, and knowing
what I was looking for (a known item search), I scrolled down on the page
until I got to the entry I needed. As the unit record is not the abstract but
the table of contents page, and the result list shows excerpt from the top
of the page not from the context of the matching words, results will often
be very enigmatic. (More about a better solution later). |
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Advanced
or “Disadvanced” Search
The
advanced qualifier is the one that should be put in quotations mark
because it is anything but advanced when you want to use its only advanced
feature, filtering a subject search by one or more ALA divisions and/or
offices or subject areas. The search below, was 'guaranteed' to find at least the
abstract of the Multimedia Research Support article from the LITA journal
shown earlier. Did it? |
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Well,
it returned
this message, unfortunately without echoing the query, but you probably
trust me that I did not change the above query to supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
just to trigger this response. A variety of subject terms combined with a
variety of divisions never yielded any results. |
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It is also a sign of
the brain damage of the software,
not just senior moment, that when I search for the Fast Fact
column edited by Ann Viles in College & Research Libraries News.
Using her full name (yes, the first name has no 'e' at the end), the software
finds only two items. |
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Given the fact that this
journal was the least neglected during the transition (though 1994 and
1995 issues were not transferred), there should be much more hits when searching by her
name which deservedly appears with her column.
Indeed, the columns are there but the search engine can't find them. When
searching for her last name alone (trying both the simple and advanced
search), one more record is retrieved, the ALA Handbook, where her name
appears on the 101st page of the PDF file as Ann Viles. Why was this not
retrieved when searching for Ann Viles is beyond me, but I am much more
concerned about the large scale omission of her columns in the search
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Navigating
and browsing
One
may say that when looking for a known item I should browse rather than
search, navigating down to the journal, volume and issue.
Trust me, I know the
importance of browsing before searching. I am the one who always reminds
students that if you don’t browse before searching then you are like the
guy who dives in a pool without first looking to see if there is water in
it.
Anyhow,
with this site I would have a hard time selling
browsing and navigation before or instead of searching. Yes, there
a few milestones and landmarks to use, but they can be frustrating on AW
for navigation.
I wanted to get to CHOICE magazine as quickly as possible, so I clicked on
the Products & Publications button, and got a nice list of ALA
journals and newsletters. Unfortunately, CHOICE (and many other) was not among them. It
should have come next to Booklist,
not only alphabetically, but also because CHOICE is also a review
publication, targeted for academic libraries. The third entry on the
page did
not make much sense and was not hot linked anyhow. With a hindsight, the title of this page
and the heading in the outline should be Selective List of
Periodicals. |
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I
frantically tried some other categories and subcategories, like Other
Products, but I saw only ALA tchotchkes, no CHOICE. First
I thought CHOICE may have been acquired by Information Today, Inc.
but I checked my sources and got a negative reply. Other
companies which went on a shopping spree like Imelda Marcos in her
salad days also flashed through my mind but I decided to go back to
navigate the new AW.
Site
Map or Site Gazetteer
Yes,
there is something called a site map, for navigation but it is more like a
site gazetteer. Using it is like navigating the streets of San Francisco
with the Columbia Gazetteer of North America in hand instead of the
Dorling Kindersley city guide book. When you click on the site map button
you get an enormously long list after an unusually long wait, until the
800K site list is displayed. The screenshot below can’t do justice to
the intimidation power of this list. |
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Basic
System Design Issues
It
is a good thing that some of the ALA journals have well compiled
indexes for each volume. These served very good purpose in the print
world. However, it is not appropriate to use the same indexes without enhancements
in the digital version. Here is an excerpt from index of one volume
of the C&RL.
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The
user who does not have at hand the printed issues has no idea about the
page ranges of the individual issues within the volume (except for some
extreme cases, like a page range of 3-21, which is obviously in the first
issue). As of now, users often must guess in which issue is an article.
These indexes should have and could have been enhanced by a direct link to the
article's abstract through the issue's table of content page. It is not
the best solution but better than leaving the users in the dark, and it could
be made perfect if articles would become the unit records instead of
the table of contents and abstracts pages, which is very pre-21st
centurish approach.
Seeing a result list produced by the new AW software is always a
pleasure by virtue of getting some other feedback than the Sorry! pages
and the No Search Results
pages.
Unfortunately,
the abstracts and their bibliographic citations are not in their own
record even after the emphatic reference in the press release to using database technology in
the new AW. The problem is that the result list shows some
excerpt from the first item on the Web page, as that is the unit record for
AW. That excerpt is unlikely to have anything to do with -say- the seventh article on
the very same Table of Contents page which matches the user’s query. The
user would hardly understand why an item about Pinyin romanization was retrieved
for the query about multimedia research support as shown earlier.
This is a problem for
practically all the results when searching for abstracts or full-text
versions of articles except when the matching article is the first one in
the journal and its excerpt is the one partially displayed in the result list.
This
is not merely an academic question. Creating a record for each article
(including the many free full text editorials and book reviews in some ALA
journals), would provide much better result list for the users. There is a
good reason for using individual works as a unit record in every journal
archives. From these unit records it is easy to create even virtual issue
records, and from those ones virtual or real volume records by the
software. This
could also pave the way for the next level, which has been reached by most
other publishers in the LIS arena, where ALA should take the lead in
digitization instead of lagging years behind its peers: the use of Digital
Object Identifiers. Digital
Object Identifiers There
have been many ALA conference papers and journal articles about the
digital object identifiers for a good reason. They allow unambiguous and
layered access to individual articles for users depending on their status
and thus authorization for access. It could also allow ALA directly to offer free
abstracts and pay-per-view full-text articles to everyone, and "free" access to
subscribers
instead of not getting involved apart from licensing the full content to aggregators as is the case now. Other publishers
have long recognized the advantage of getting in the ring of direct
digital publishing. Very
importantly, digital object identifiers also can solve most of the
problems of changing URLs, by keeping the DOI as the standard identifier, and behind the
scene changing its pointer to a new URL which replaces the URL in the DOI-URL
pair. If ALA had been a trail-blazer,
or at least a follower of the pack, it could have avoided this current chaos. There
are many large publishers who joined the DOI Foundation, and more than 200
publishers signed up to the largest DOI registration agency, CrossRef. About 8
million articles have now DOI, which many publishers -rightly- flaunt. Among
the many advantages of DOIs is their brevity, and much less error-prone
nature. The more authors start knowing about the DOIs, the more will use
them in their citations. It already offers incredibly smooth access to
articles for qualified users (and to abstracts for anyone) in
the CrossRef-enabled, DOI-endowed archives of participating publishers, as
well as following citations not only within the publishers' own journals,
but also among the journals of rival publishers. It will also
revolutionize in the long run, citation indexing and citation searching by
offering very convenient and instant access to both cited and citing
journals. In turn, this will enormously strengthen the value of the
citation indexes, and will implement almost perfectly what Eugene Garfield has
envisioned, and dreamt of for decades. It would be good if ALA would not
stay out of the
loop. The first step is to get acquainted with DOI in real. The
International DOI Federation (IDF) offers the option to experiment
with DOI for a mere $1,000. Better to start now as the next National
Library Week is only 362 days away. If I were enough Javascript-savvy I
would have included here a variable which would automatically keep
counting down the days to the next festive occasion. Then again, I would
declare any day a festive day when I see the first issue of an ALA journal
sporting a DOI. The excellent content of most ALA journals would deserve
reliable and efficient hyperlinking. So would librarians and other
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