University of Michigan: Putting a Librarian's Face on Search
This is a superb idea that's a win-win for both the user and library/librarian. Personal relationships can go a long way that can potentially help the researcher and also help a library gain the credit they likely deserve as a resource (not just a building)) that's ready to help when called upon using one of many communication tools (IM/Virtual Reference, SMS, Skype, e-mail, etc). A personal relationship can also assist a librarian in becoming more proactive in how they work with users.
We realize that this is easier said than done but it's an idea that we think is worth talking about and modifying for each library (based on needs of users and resources the library has available).
When you do a search on the University of Michigan Library's web site, you get not only results from the catalog, web site, online journal and database collections, and more, you also get a librarian who is a subject specialist related to your search term. While the matching is not perfect, it provides a human face on search results. So, for example, if you search for "Kant," in addition to books and databases, you also get the subject specialist librarians for humanities and philosophy...When we can't make a reliable match to a subject specialist, we provide a link to Ask a Librarian, our reference service.
[Clip: How the Academic Disciplines Work and Where They Come From, Must Read]
In a site search, we do a special query of the library catalog behind the scenes and get the first 100 catalog results (sorted according to the catalog's relevance ranking algorithms). We sort those results into Academic Disciplines. If more than 25 items are in a single Academic Discipline, we include the subject specialist responsible for that particular area. (We set the threshold at 25 matches to help ensure a relevant match, but a librarian specializing in the "wrong" subject is arguably better than no librarian at all.)
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