March 2009 Archives

Computers in Libraries 2009 Conference Notes

Howard County Library

Amy De Groff, Director, Information Technology
Danny Bouman, Web Designer

To patrons who are searching for information or support, there is no difference (or there shouldn't be) between the library website and the library catalog. Most libraries manage these two services separately, on different servers and sometimes even in different departments. They look different and operate differently. Howard County Library created a new model. The catalog and the website do the same thing -- educate patrons about collections and services. They wrote a new cms that integrates with Vu-Find (their new front end). They are replacing their ILS with Koha (test group within the library called the Koha Bees). It is interesting to note that they had Aquabrowser as their previous interface and now are going with open source (Vu-Find).

Highlights:

• New and hot items - they run a nightly script with their new items. Anything they've gotten within the last 6 months they check in with amazon nightly and display the most popular.
  
• Blog that anyone is allowed to write - a few guidelines -it has to be about something in the collection.
  
• rss feeds
  
• libx on all the staff computers

The idea of an integrated website and catalog interface makes so much sense to me. Our patrons don't need to know where they are (website, catalog, metalib, digital collections) - they just need to be able to find the reource or service they are looking for! 

Computers in Libraries 2009 Conference Notes

Helene Blowers, Director, Digital Strategy
Columbus Metropolitan Library

Helene's talk focused on what strategies we need to employ in our libraries to enable, enrich and empower our patrons.

Social Identity is very important to digital natives. Creativity is very important to digital natives. Cultural consumers thrive on information and ideas to fuel their own expression. Nearly 2/3 of online teens are content creators. Those that use social networking sites are more than 5 times as likely to create content - it is their way of fueling social expression. Digital Natives extend their real identity to their online world.

Digital Information Quality. We are starting to see a shift from authoritative control to collaborative control. User generated content is becoming the most trusted form. Social responsibility is a really important part of this. If you looked at the "former" Encyclopedia Britannica vs wikipedia there were actually the same number of errors. The difference between rthe two was that wikipedia could be updated immediately. Britannica realized the problem and opened up a wiki layer on their encyclopedia. 

Digital Immigrants (you are what you owned)
vs
Digital Pioneers (you are what you create and share)

Digital Advocacy is the idea that what you do online can actually make a difference, lead the generation. 

So, what does all this mean for Libraries and how do we apply strategies around this? What elements need to be present in order for our strategies to support virtual users. In the Libraries, we must be able to:
 

1. Engage -  enable customers to connect with library staff, services and with each other in meaningful ways. We want to make our people to feel connected.
2. Enrich - provide customers with a rich online experience that enhances their local branch experience and daily lives. Our customers feel they are getting great value from their library?
   
3. Empower - to enable customers the ability to personalize and add value to the library experience and allow the community to celebrate themselves. We want to help our customers feel good about themselves.

Computers in Libraries 2009 Conference Notes

Joseph Ryan
Digital Initiatives Librarian and User Experience Advocate
NCSU Libraries

This was a very relevant presentation. We are currently trying to determine what the future will be of our own Libraries Facebook Application and whether it merits any further development.

Joe referenced Dana Boyd's PhD Dissertation on why people use social networks. For adults, it's professional networking and for teens, it's socializing, commenting on friends' activities and extending their own persona online.

But, applications are just not very popular.  NCSU Library asked the question, why is use so low? If there is a way for the libraries to help students connect with each other, usage might increase. So, NCSU created a wireframe for a Libraries Activity Wall with the goal of helping students who are at the library meet up in an informal way.

The application:

1. Asks what are you working on right now?
2. Shows recent activity by your friends.
3. Shows recent activity by everyone in the library.
   
4. Provides a link to room reservation system.
5. Provides checkbox for allowing other people to join you. "I am...         "  - you can fill in what you are working on and text for where in the library you are.

Before developing further, NCSU conducted a focus group (four students who were all undergrads). Students wanted a tool to form study groups in low barrier way, especially at the end of the semester.  They disliked the fact that it was a facebook app! Every student hated fb apps (fb is too noisy already) and they also stated that they wanted to build groups around courses, not around location as provided in the app design.

So NCSU is not going to further develop this application within facebook. They do want to help people meet up in the library, but would like it in some other venue or format - possible a kiosk at the libraries entrances, a link off the libraries website, a widget for internal and external integration, etc.  They did find out that although students want to get together based on courses they are, but many students have no idea of the real course name, number and even the prof's name.

Next steps
NCSU is going to have a larger focus group to find out about how a larger group of students feel about facebook apps. They will probably continue to develop a study group application, but it may not be integrated into facebook at all.

Frank Cervone
Chicago State Libraries

Darlene Fichter
University Saskatchewan

List of helpful tools for library webmasters...

Accessibility check
wave.webaim.org

HTML Table Creator
www.spectrum-research.com/V2/projects_table_generator.asp

visual thesaurus
www.visualthesaurus.com

Fancy Zoom
http://www.cabel.name/2008/02/fancyzoom-10.html

Uni-Form
http://sprawsm.com/uni-form/
Do it yourself, build a form. Well structured, semantic, accessible and usable forms

feed.informer
http://feed.informer.com/

php list
www.phplist.com/
open source newsletter manager

textexpander
http://www.smileonmymac.com/TextExpander/
How can I code twice as fast as you?

Crowd Science
crowdscience.com
By surveying a small number visitors with carefully constructed questionnaires, Crowd Science Demographics is able to build comprehensive profiles that give publishers a deep understanding of their audience.

fusestats web analytics
http://www.fusestats.com
Gives you a visual clue at where people are looking on your site.

Read it Later
http://www.ideashower.com/ideas/launched/read-it-later
Firefox extension

Top Posts Widget
http://www.postrank.com/publishers

Google Friend Connect for Site
http://www.google.com/friendconnect

Firefox plugin for screen shots
Fireshot

Filejuicer
http://echoone.com/filejuicer/
(not free)

XnView
Allows you to exchange from all types of formats to others.

Visual Tools

colorpicker
http://www.colorpicker.com

Color Wizard
http://www.colorsontheweb.com/colorwizard

Create a font from your own handwriting
http://www.yourfonts.com

Lovely charts
http://www.lovelycharts.com

XML/SWF Charts
www.maani.us/xml_charts/index.php

Mind Mapping Tools

http://bubbl.us

http://www.mindmeister.com

scriptaculous

www.xcavator.net
upload an image, and based on that image, it will search other sites to find similar image

Review Basics
http://www.reviewbasics.com

Virus Total
http://www.virustotal.com

Chunk it
http://www.tigerlogic.com/ChunkIt/

http://net.tutsplus.com
http://www.noupe.com

Nina McHale
University of Colorado

Question: How can we get our info out to our users?
Answer: The embedded widget-ized Library

Flickr Badge creator ("stolen code") can be used on course management system, personal web pages, facebook pages, igoogle gadgets, anyplace people can cut and paste html. You can set this up in such a way that they can just copy and paste the code. Create a "steal this code" tool. Decide what kind of widget code chunks you want to offer - catalog, databases, combo, etc. Plan web page layout of widgets and code generator text area, and remember to provide an exact working example of the code that you are offering right next to the code.
View the source code of: http://library.auraria.edu/guides/general/sea/rebboxes.html

Remember to offer an email address or email link form for help or feedback. Place the tools and link to them as appropriate and advertise the service. Be prepared for success! This provides great opportunities for outreach.

Flickr Badge Generator:
http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne

Auraria Library "Steal This Code!" Page
http://library.auraria.edu/guides/general/searchboxes.html

University of Minnesota Duluth "Widgets" Pages
http://www.d.umn.edu/lib/widgets/
http://www.d.umn.edu/lib/widgets/dropdown/index.htm


Curt Tagtmeier
Fremont Public Library

mobiSiteGalore - let's you easily create a mobile design via a template. Unfortunately, there is advertising at the bottom of the mobile page.

Computers in Libraries 2009 Conference Notes

Jeff Wisniewski
University of Pittsburgh

Link to presentation

Perfect timing for this presentation as we are about to get started with our own redesign at the Penn State University Libraries!

Good reasons to redesign:

• dysfunctional navigation
• site doesn't scale
• difficult to update
• usability shows need for redesign!

Does the site need to look substantially different with a fix of usability issues? Examples - amazon, ebay have remained relatively the same since 2000. We should think about maintaining consistency through redesign. Users actually dislike redesign - examples-facebook (antiredesign facebook group has 1.7 million members).

Evidence-based redesign - usability testing and logs should inform redesign. Make sure your redesign is based on data!
 
Potential Pitfalls of Redesign

1. Discovery
   
   • failing to account for assessment time and effort - or even worse failing to attain data at all.
   • where is the most important content on your website? make sure that as you redesign, you focus on highly-used, high-value services. make it easy for folks to find most important resources.
2. Creating Buy-in
   
   • show what other cool things other libraries are doing
   • show the data - make your case for redesign
   • Avoid death by committee, use data
3. Design for the users - not necessarily the librarians. Librarians are expert users with mad skills.
4. Is a traditional page-based model the best? Think OUTSIDE the box!
5. Spending too much time designing - "...there are more than a billion pages on the web. Surely there's one that you can start with?" Spend time on the content. There are a lot of resources out there.
   
6. Avoid only looking at other Library sites. Users expectations are not formed on Library web sites. Users are spending the vast majority of their time on sites that are not yours.
7. Have smart goals for the redesign such as - increase google page rank, overall site usability, measurable increase in use of ejournal finder...specific and measurable goals so that you know whether you've attained your goal.
   
8. Remember to communicate! Consider a redesign blog or wiki - manage the expectations. Keep your colleagues abreast of what is going on. Have the entire process be conversational.
9. Redesign by committee doesn't work - find evidence to keep tedious discussions to a minimum.
10. Define primary functions of your site and make sure these paths are clear. What do you want your web site to accomplish - make sure you are designing around those tasks. Queens Library site - their high priority task is connecting people to their various types of resources.
    
11. As with design - lots of different functionality has already been done. Use it and don't waste time redoing it yourself.
12. Focus on the remarkable tools- next gen opac, fed search, ejournal finder, photo tagger, assignment calculator.
13. Invest time in rewriting content. Make sure your writing is optimized for the web. Your site can benefit immensely by really looking at content and rewriting.
14. Design for SEO using simple URLs, page titles should be descriptive and unique, proper and consistent use of structural html, descriptive alt tags. After redign, submit new sitremap to google. Ask google to remove outdated/old content from their cache.
15. Design with social media optimization in mind using addthis.com, tag your page, do server side redirects.
16. Don't forget to update robots.txt file, update your analytics definitions, paths, groups, etc.
17. Remember that you will need to maintain the site and keep it fresh. Have a maintenance strategy. Think about moving forward with iterative redesign.

Excellent pre-conference workshop.

Presenters:
Jason Clark
Karen Coombs

Pre Conference Workshop Notes

API
http://www.lijason/files/api/lofi/

structured data=xml and json

Why use web services

• access to content and data stores that you otherwise could not provide(zip code, news, pictures)
• enhance site with a service that is not feasible for you to provide(maps, search, products,etc/.)
• combine services into a seamless service you provide

When APIs are opened up to developers, services are created that the provider never intended or imagined. (worldcat search rss that Jason created)

Consume web services and add value to our site.


Jangle - Ross Singer
Write a middle layer to use data in library ILSs

programmable web
directory of useable apis

API Protocols
SOAP
XML-RPC- technorati, FeedBurner, used for blogs, an updating protocol.
REST - Representational State Transfer, unique data resources with web address, piggybacks on the notion of url - you just have to know the url of the data source.we get back different data by adding different parameters to the url.

You can put the url in the browser and go there to see the data. You can find out where the problem is. We intuitively know how to work with a url and how to query the data via the url.  Every resource is uniquely addressable.  It's very simple - you are only constrained by what you can put in a url to get the data back. There is no permanent state - it is what you see from the url.

Flickr API

There is a learning curve with APIs, reading documentation is key.

Pre-Conference Workshop Notes
Create a beta space for the Libraries where we can play and all librarians can see what we're working on and have the chance to play with it!.

Great tutorial workshop - notes from the session:

Michael Sauers

Twitter
widget to show library twitter feed on page.

Flickr
Profile Widget from Big Huge Labs

Library Thing Widget
add new books into Library Thing Account, display covers on web page.You can use feeds from your Library Things account, and use Yahoo pipes to direct people back  to your catalog.

Calendar
Embedded Google calendar for Library activity. You can pull rss from this. Can we do something like this - public calendar events to display out of oracle calendar?

Grazr
Create a list of feeds you want your patrons to read embedded in the web site. List of feeds for staff on intranet.

Feed 2JS (feed 2JS.org)
You can download this to your local server (php). Display feed on your web page

feed.informer
create a digest for feeds that you want to pull in to display on your website. You can add filters, search queries, etc

Karen Coombs

World Cat Affiliate Tools
3 types of searches ...Search for items in Libraries near you

Database widgets:
Proquest -
Ebsco
JStor

Embeddable Google Books
Google Book Search API

WordPress settings for iPhone, iPod Touch, etc

xfruits.com
Take an rss and convert to mobile device (for any mobile device)

Google Book Search Mobile App

WorldCat in process of developing mobile version of worldcat.org.


Creating Mashups with Yahoo Pipes
data sources: database search results, catalog search results, blogs, lists of resources
pipes.yahoo.com

Slide show of covers from rss feed from catalog
fetch feed - rss
loop - loops through each item in feed
string builder
emit results
output

You could do this with google books or amazon covers

Amazon feed remixed-
Amazon feed
rename (isbn)
Regular expression
Build link to google for table of contents
Build link to reviews at Library Thing
Build link to worldcat.org

You can clone other peoples pipes to see how they are done. You have to start with data to get data.

Jason Clark
http://www.lib.montana.edu

Open Search Widgets
Google Gadgets

Library as portal - how we can pull and deliver these pieces to different places?

Google Gadget editor can be used to create these as well -

Base url of the library/mobile

Many emulators -  iPhoney

Open search plugins- how can we add stuff into the browser?

widgets and tools at Montana - http://www.lib.montana.edu/tools/

with mobile apps - start simple - what can we start with

Pick one and become an expert at on piece, experimaent and play with what you want to do. Work through amd see how it works.

data feeds,
search boxes
prime candidates for new environments - look at the little pieces that you may be able to pluck and put in these new environments. Let's think about what we can aggregate and put in these new environments.

Feed for this session:
http://delicious.com/tag/cil2009+w6