The VERSO Solution

The trend is clear: every year, more and more reference sources go from print to online, from the stacks to the library's homepage. At Quinnipiac University's Arnold Bernhard Library in Hamden, CT, we realized that these subscriptions are more than the occasional web offering to supplement the library's mission. They have become an important collection in their own right and in most cases duplicate bound paper books on the reference shelves. This seems like a smart move for a university with a growing distance education program: give students access to reference materials, even if they live in another state or are serving in Iraq.

But while we had the materials to offer the students, we needed a delivery mechanism for the electronic content that could be as simple as the reference shelf is for print. We needed to make these works more visible to our remote users and convert these e-resources into something more than a listing in an online catalog or a lone link on a web page. What we needed was a compelling virtual reference shelf, even if it meant building it ourselves.

The idea for our Virtual Electronic Reference Source (VERSO) was born of certain limitations in our catalog in terms of remote access to reference materials. Our digital services librarian actively acquired new electronic titles to bolster our online reference collection, including a number of titles from Gale Virtual Reference Library, Greenwood Press, and more than 1700 full-text works from the American Council of Learned Societies. We added all of these to the OPAC, including full MARC records and cover images where available. But they were getting lost among general keyword searches because the catalog displays newest titles first, and the majority of these were published in the 1970s and 1980s.

QCat is well suited to provide access to electronic titles because a catalog user can choose to search only for electronic sources, but tracking data showed that 97 percent of our users ignore this option. The online reference works were still not getting the attention we hoped they would. These valuable resources were getting lost in a catalog of 250,000 entries.

Educating users to take better advantage of the catalog is an ideal solution but difficult to accomplish. The library has an excellent program of bibliographic instruction, and yet the average student gets only one to three hours of library instruction in the course of an undergraduate career. We needed something else to connect our students with the electronic resources that would benefit them most.

Like many smaller academic libraries, we didn't have the budget for a ready-made vendor solution, if one even existed. So I began researching the possibility of building a homemade reference interface. We found many libraries already using terms like “Virtual Reference Desk” and “Virtual Library,” but these usually revealed web pages with text links to online titles. We found writings that theorized about a visual interface to electronic titles but no example that fit our needs.

While looking for a model virtual electronic reference collection, I came across a passage by Shiao-Feng Su that gave me insight into the solution to our dilemma: “As users seek out familiarity of print in electronic environments,” she wrote in a 2005 article for The Electronic Library, “the ideal e-book search interface should exploit multimedia and animation techniques to make users feel that they are almost present in the physical library and conduct searches in familiar ways with the print environments.” This sort of familiarity was exactly what we hoped to achieve. We wanted a visual interface with links to titles, blending an online environment with the more traditional reference stacks.

In our initial planning, we decided to lead the user to a page that showed an overhead map of our reference department with the general subject areas defined. Once the user clicked on a virtual “range” of books, he or she would be shown a shelf of book spines. Clicking on a spine would bring up a page with the cover image of the book, and one more click would bring up the table of contents or the homepage of the remote resource.

As a summer project, I decided to create a working beta for VERSO. The first order of business was call numbers. Unfortunately, none of the MARC records supplied by the vendors included these. But since all of the titles had associated print editions, it was only a matter of sending my student assistant on to the web to search OHIOLINK, Harvard, and the Library of Congress. We were looking for just enough information to place the titles next to others on the same subject and didn't need the complete call numbers. For instance, the title “New Dictionary of the History of Ideas” was found in the OHIOLINK catalog with the call number CB9 N49 2005. For VERSO, we shortened that to CB9.

In general, there was a fair amount of trial and error in finding the right amount of detail to fit onto each book spine image. In many cases, we had to shorten a title, like replacing “Gardner's Full-Color Encyclopedia of” with “Gardner's Encyclopedia of Plants.” Once we had all the call numbers and titles set, we created the spine images.

We began a parallel library of book cover images that were readily available for download from the vendors. To maintain some standardization, I created a blank cover of a leatherbound volume as a background for the images.

Then it was time to do the programming that made all of these objects work together to deliver our virtual reference library to the user. First, I had to create the top-level screen that branched off into the different subject categories. We abandoned the idea of an aerial view because a series of pictures taken from ground level more closely replicates browsing the physical stacks.

Finally, I had to create the HTML file to represent the shelves and tie all of this preliminary work together. Each reference source then had a number of files associated with it, including the category-level HTML shelf page in which the title was listed, a spine image created for the resource, a cover image downloaded from the vendor, and the HTML page linking to the external resource.

In August, we asked the university's webmaster for directory space to get a real home for the project, and moved VERSO to its permanent space (learn.quinnipiac.edu/verso/versomain.html). Later that month, my student assistant added code snippets from statcounter.com so we could track traffic and usage statistics on three levels: the main pages, the subject-level pages, and the individual title pages.

In the days before the semester began, I replaced the link to the Gale Reference titles on the library's web pages with a link to VERSO. We then sent out an announcement to the Book People mailing list, a forum for librarians involved in the publication of public domain books on the web. That generated interest from librarians worldwide. With little publicity beyond word of mouth, the first semester statistics showed that people found the VERSO site and used it every day. The most popular single titles were viewed 25–30 times during the semester. The only negative feedback was from a colleague in academic computing who was uncomfortable tilting his head to read the titles on the spines.

On the other hand, the library's public services and distance education librarian, Ronda Kolbin, was enthusiastic about VERSO being an intuitive tool for distance education students and faculty. At the 2008 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia, another librarian who works full-time running a virtual library for an online university noted VERSO's interesting and transparent e-reference approach. He also suggested eliminating one click from the user's browsing process by using a rollover preview of the book cover when the mouse hovers over the link, as opposed to taking the user to a separate intermediate page displaying the book image.

During the conceptualization phase of the process, professor Greg Garvey from the department of interactive digital design invited me to present the working project to his Advanced Interactive Authoring class. I took him up on the offer later in the year, with the following wish list in hand: a template to add new titles without tediously creating each file by hand and a pop-up image of the cover when a user's pointer rolls over the book spine.

At semester's end, two teams of students from Garvey's class presented their results. The most promising kept much of the visual quality of the original VERSO but scrapped the individual spines for a list kept in call number order. However, it had the timesaving template that was necessary for the future of the project. I let them know that I could live with that compromise if they could make the covers pop up as the mouse rolled over the links.

Having a single book spine image still feels like looking at a library shelf, and it solves the problem of users needing to tilt their heads to read the titles. There is a good chance that the final design will incorporate much of the work done by Garvey's students. The final details will be worked out at the end of the spring 2008 semester.

VERSO lends itself to numerous types of enhancements. A library science student I spoke with suggested that the concept could be taken to a new level: use it as an overlay to the online catalog so students could browse shelves and check on the location and status of every book in the library. Such an exciting expansion presupposes a future capability that addresses the main weakness of the current system—records are still created by hand. It would need to be fully automated to handle thousands of records.

Even in its current, limited iteration, VERSO's utility for distance education was underscored by the acceptance of my proposal to speak about the interface at the Off Campus Library Services conference in Salt Lake City in April 2008. No doubt, a commercial vendor will market a graphic interface someday that allows the user to download data from its ILS to create an instant virtual library. This would be consistent with the overall trend in libraries to enhance remote access to all research materials.

For the time being, a grassroots, homemade virtual reference tool is probably the best solution available to a library and reference collection of our size. Except for the students' and other expected enhancements, all of VERSO is put together with simple HTML programming well within the means of almost any library.