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Why Pika's Awesome:

A comparison of Pika to other discovery layer options.

Presenters: Beth Gallinger, Flatirons Library Consortium; James Staub, Nashville Public Library

Session: Friday, October 5th at 11:15 a.m.

Room: Monument

MUG 2018

[BETH] Good morning, I’m Beth Gallinger with Flatirons Library Consortium. For those of you who don’t know, we are a bit more than a discovery partner. Last year, we migrated our servers here to Marmot and have been working with Marmot staff to provide backup services to FLC. As the chair of the discovery committee, I will be presenting “Why Pika’s Awesome” with James Staub from Nashville Public Library, another discovery partner. James?

[JAMES] Outside library-land when folks ask “what do you do?” I don’t hesitate to answer: “Do you remember the card catalog in the library? I do that, online, in 2018.”

[save the rest of the story for slide 3]

Since I’m presenting remotely today, I’ll cue Beth Gallinger to change the slide by making a mighty Pika “Meep!”

“MEEP!”

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Record Grouping

[JAMES]

But I haven’t always been proud of our catalog.

Back then, in the distant mists of time passed, way back in 2013, we went looking for a new patron experience. We wanted a discovery layer that allowed for OverDrive discovery and delivery in the browser. We wanted a discovery layer that leveraged enhanced content to help our readers find the next book in a series or a similar title to read next. We wanted a discovery layer that displayed a lot of covers. We. Like. Lots. Of. COVERS!

Pika checked all those boxes.

What we didn’t know then: Pika was about to check a box - a really big box - we didn’t even know existed.

In 2013, we had a citywide read: The Life of Pi. We had three different OverDrive eBooks with multiple copies each; one had something like 85 holds in the queue. The other two were available but showed up further down in the search results.

It just so happened that, at the same time, we were trying to figure out how to help patrons find available copies of the next title in a popular series.

We asked Marmot R&D for fixes to these problems - and man did they deliver.

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Record Grouping continued

Record grouping is AWESOME
All formats of a title in a single result
Gets a title into a patron's hand ASAP
Facilitates patron "format jumping"
Patches problem of heterogeneous cataloging across Public and School (and OverDrive and Hoopla and and and...)
Helps relevance ranking

[JAMES] What we got was the most awesome and most underwhelmingly-named feature in Library Land. “Record Grouping”

Aside: Remember my answer for “What do you do?”: “Remember the card catalog in the library? I do that, online.”

If the non-Library folks seem at all interested - which they actually do, sometimes - I talk about how Nashville has the best online catalog out there. I say, “Let me show the coolest part. It’s called Record Grouping. We call it ‘awesome’ for short. Pull out your phone, go to catalog.library.nashville.org, search for your favorite book. You see how the top result is the thing you searched for - and how you can see the book and the large type and the audiobook and the ebook and the eaudiobook and the playaway all together in one place?”

Then they say something like “Wow! I can tell you’re really excited about all this. Now I can’t wait to see the the cool part! What is it?”

[AWKWARD PAUSE] And I sigh - *Sigh*. Pika’s Grouped Works is exactly how library catalogs *should* work. And I bet in a few years it’s how all library catalogs will work.

[Read the bullets]

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NYPL

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Seattle

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Nashville

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Features for Everyone!

Beth:

One of the things we at Flatirons love, is the Customizability of Pika. We can make it work for each of our members without much hassle.

When I first came to FLC, I worked primarily for Boulder and at the 2 hours of reference desk work per week I would find myself lying to patrons. Now this wasn’t on purpose but the WebPac we had setup would only search the physical library you were in. Being from large systems that we all about showing ALL records, I would do my search and if I didn’t find it, I would tell the patron we didn’t have it. OFTEN NOT TRUE! Often, one of our other members would have the item. I would just forget to change my search settings to search all libraries. When I asked about why this was and if we could change it, I got a lot of resistance.

Pika allowed us to search all of our records but differentiate between who owns what!

I stopped lying!!
You can see this from this search here we show what is on the shelf, what is checked out and what is available at other libraries!!

This is through: Ownership of Records but you can also use the drop down to Searching different Collections
Pika also offerens different Methods of Search and Relevancy

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Features for Everyone!

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Features for Everyone!

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Pika Scoping

[JAMES] Pika’s flexibility with scoping is pretty incredible.

[CLICK] We can provide our off-site patrons with search results from the Nashville Public Library system.

[CLICK] We can provide site-specific experiences that boost the local collection. Here’s our catalog scoped to our tiniest branch, Watkins Park. Note the availability facet scoped to 4,452 currently available grouped works. When you’re using any on-site OPAC, this is what you get.

[CLICK] We can provide a different experience to patrons in schools. Here’s the catalog scoped for what’s available at the schools as a system (which is basically all the public stuff plus all the school stuff, which is a lot of stuff).

[CLICK] Our schools generally do not interlibrary loan among themselves. Each school’s students need a school-specific catalog that is scoped to show their collection plus everything that is available to the student through the Nashville Public Library. Here’s Antioch High School’s catalog - note the school code 110 in the URL. Although they have 16,412 titles currently available on the shelf, they have access to 777,000 titles, including 435,000 immediately available online titles.

[CLICK] Because Elementary students have different needs than High School students, we can limit the Elementary catalogs to Kids titles. Through the magic of Grouped Works, this applies to both books and eBooks, regardless of what the eBook vendor is doing (or is doing wrong, or is just not doing) to identify the age-appropriate audience for a title. Here is Amqui Elementary’s catalog (code 105) scoped to 100,000 titles.

[CLICK] And we can do all this for about 150 different scopes -

[CLICK] each with its own URL,

[CLICK] each applied automatically to the patron when they are on site at a library location.

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Pika is a superhero

[JAMES] Don’t let the glasses fool you. Pika is a superhero.

Many of you know about Masquerade mode - the ability to see the patron interface exactly as the patron sees it. Masquerade is awesome, but that’s not what I wanna talk about now.

There is one huge hidden strength that Pika has in its code that I believe is unique within the world of library discovery layers.

For two years, Nashville students would search our Pika catalog and very quickly see combined public and school results - Pika was getting regular bibliographic and item record updates from two entirely independent ILSes (Millennium for the public and Library.Solution for the schools) and updating its own index every few minutes.

For two years, Nashville students would use a single ID (their student ID) to log into Pika. They would see their transactions from both ILSes in one place - and never even realize there were two places to begin with. When placing a hold, Pika would determine which ILS to use for the transaction to get the student the book the fastest.

These two functions combined were necessary for the success of our Limitless Libraries program.

Don’t let the glasses fool you. Pika is a superhero, able to collect and act in two entirely different worlds at the same time. Bilocation is one of the qualifying acts for sainthood. Just sayin’.

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Pika and Readers Advisory: Search nothing to get everything...

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And then use facets to discover what you want.

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Non-Catalog/Enhanced Content

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Non-Catalog/Enhanced Content

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Digital Archives

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Sideloading/APIs

[JAMES] Before 2012, once a month or perhaps once quarterly our lead cataloger would fill up her curse jar while cobbling together records to *kind of* *sort of* provide access to new titles in our OverDrive collection.

[BETH] I can relate. Our catalogers cursed when OverDrive and eBrary records had to get into Sierra. They were supposed to do it quarterly, but often happened annually. With dread. And gnashing of teeth.

[JAMES] Toward the end of 2012 I spent an insane, embarrassing amount of time - 200 hours? - automating the transformation of free OverDrive title metadata into Millennium bib record adds and updates so our patrons could find up-to-date-ish eBooks in our catalog. When we went shopping for a Discovery Layer the next year and we saw Pika’s OverDrive API integration I let out a little sigh. I saw all that work become utterly useless. Poof. Just a little sigh, though, ‘cause the functionality we saw in Pika was way better than what we did and I wanted Pika!

We were clarifying what we wanted out of an ILS - an inventory management system for tangible circulating stuff - vs. a patron experience - a place to find the next thing you’re going to read. We stumbled into a clear philosophy: if the ILS ain’t gonna manage its life cycle, it doesn’t need to be in there. We don’t need to clutter the ILS with eBooks (eAudiobooks, eVideos, eTc); instead we need these things in the patron interface - and we need them there as quickly as they are available.

Pika’s OverDrive API integration was the perfect solution.

OverDrive is currently the only eContent resource that is integrated with Pika via APIs (which means patrons can check out OverDrive stuff in Pika). Sideloading is an alternative way to include eContent in the discovery layer that grabs the bibliographic metadata and indexes it without any human intervention, but does not allow for any of the patron functions like holds or checkouts.

Imagine our tiny pika friend foraging along the rocky mountainside, picking up hundreds of thousands of MARC records and neatly stacking them next to its adorable home for the winter. Or not; that’s probably a terrible analogy.

Point is: If there’s MARC for it, it can get sideloaded. Nashville uses twelve different sideloads to get more than a half million bib records into the discovery layer that aren’t in the ILS at all.

[BETH] a cataloger actually hugged me. So thrilled they didn’t have to spend the time combing over the OverDrive, Hoopla, etc. records.

...

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Pika Team(work)!

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Future

[JAMES] I’d like to wrap up the presentation on a serious note (like an “eat your broccoli” serious note) - and a blank slide. Along with the transparency Marmot provides into the development of Pika comes responsibility for Pika’s library customers. That’s us. We really, really, really can’t complain about an unresponsive or unreasonable vendor. Each of us has a responsibility to our patrons to let the Pika team know the problems our patrons are having. Each of us has a responsibility to our patrons to to envision the best of all possible Pikas and to push for it.

The top of my vision list:

More API integrations (Hoopla, rbdigital, freegal, ILLiad, MackinVIA) to give our patrons a centralized place to find all their library resources and transactions.

Record grouping adjustments (including language as a factor, prioritizing grouped eContent)

What’s yours?