Of Lipstick Tubes & Librarian Webmakers

So I watched Luke Wrobleski’s opening keynote for DrupalCon, Day 3. It was a kick in the butt to move us ALL IMMEDIATELY into mobile first. And I couldn’t help thinking to myself, if I’m struggling with this, what are our library vendors doing to make sure that they’ve rebuild their web interfaces with a mobile-first focus? Have they reduced the amount of content they expose in their interfaces by 80%? Have they replaced checkboxes with larger targets? Have they thought about just highlighting what the user needs - only showing the minimum of what they want first, and then only more if they ask for it? Are they converting to HTML5 with media queries?
Our database vendors, our integrated library system vendors, our providers of digital repositories/asset management systems (like contentdm) - what are their plans for dealing with the mobile revolution? What’s their path forward? We should demand to know.
This is the joy of taking on the role of being a true creator of websites rather than just being a webmaster or content author. Every library needs a full, professional (by which I mean, web professional, not librarian whose done a little html) web team (or at least 1 full-time web person). Or else, they need to keep a full team on retainer & keep rehiring them every year to keep up with technological developments. If libraries want to remain relevant, they have to truly be the bridges across the digital divide. They can’t do that if they can’t even build good websites or understand today’s web methodologies. They won’t even know what to demand fro their vendors. That much is clear to me.
It’s like libraries (& worse still, library administrators who keep allocating resources to other activities, i.e., hiring MLS’ to do copy cataloging instead of using their money on web workers) built html pages in 1999, then decided that’s all they ever needed to do. As the web evolved in technique, process, methodology, and capability, most libraries did not (even though there is an annual conference called “Internet Librarian”!) So they don’t even realize how far behind they are. Nor do they respect the skillsets required for true web development. It’s not willful ignorance. It’s just - as my sister reminded me - “you don’t know what you don’t know”.
Just as your average librarian / white collar worker of any sort doesn’t realize how much talent, skill, and technology goes into the building of the smallest part, they don’t realize what it takes to really build meaningful web presences. Before you get your dander up (unless you’ve been doing true web development yourself, in which case, I can only apologize for my own earlier ignorance), consider this: how do you make a lipstick tube?
Couldn’t just anybody create a lipstick tube? It’s a simple piece of metal, often wrapped with plastic or capped by plastic these days.
My husband is a tool-and-die maker. Tool-and-die making is a common profession (less so these days) in the industrialized northeast. It means he builds the tooling that make the parts. You may not even realize that there is a maker behind the scenes who makes the modular tooling that gets used by the larger presses, as one example, that push out the parts. The toolmaker also has to debug the process, so that when they hand it off to the lower-level (well, fewer hours of education) machinists for straight production using that tooling. Unlike your pre/misconceptions about manufacturing, this job requires a lot of work and education. It requires at least 4,000 hours of work and a lot of classroom-based work which requires an understanding of geometry and trigonometry. They have to learn how to run specific types of machines, to understand the tensile strength and hardening properties of metals. I don’t even understand all that goes into it. I do know that it was intensive. Additionally, there are different kinds of toolmakers. There are, for example, progressive toolmakers, like my husband. And then there are eyelet toolmakers. Eyelet toolmakers create tubes - for example, lipstick tubes. The process of making a lipstick tube includes drawing out metal into a tubular shape bit by bit. Beyond broad brush strokes I’m giving you here, I really don’t understand this stuff. But I respect those who do because I can see how much knowledge and technique goes into it.
At Drupalcon, I feel like I’m learning to be a webmaker and like I’m becoming professional for the first time (despite having had my MLS for quite a while). I can’t believe that professional librarians would have more trouble grokking how to do metadata and build taxonomies than the people who work as professional web developers do. Moreover, I find it somewhat shocking that many librarians are unaware of how google results are altered by the concerted efforts of a subsector of the professional web world - Search Engine Optimizers. I find it frustrating that we don’t think about user experience first, THEN look at making our many systems work together to create that experience, that we don’t put the person who handles the website in charge of working with all aspects of their web presence in order to make that possible, that we silo the systems we use & accept that a catalog would ever be a separate experience than the rest of the library’s website.
We need to all learn to be (or at least respect and hire professional) webmakers.

Calls to Action from DrupalCon thusfar

• Encourage librarians to go to The Risk & Reward Conference in CO this September (rsquaredconference.org)
• Get on version control for real (I'd tested with a "clean build", but not kept up with the latest iteration of the Drupal build I'm doing... I'd thought, I'm not really writing my own code & that I was the only one building the site, so why use version control, but everyone says that I should already have it as part of my process, so there we go, back to SmartGit)
• Do even more with drush
• Learn my way up the drupal ladder & help others to do the same - learndrupal.org
• Contribute to the community - help them improve - web experience management, content authoring experience for D8
• Use & encourage others to use the We the People petition section of the White House website
• Try out the "conditional fields" module to only exposed "advanced" (more complex) settings to authors who've chosen that mode
• Learn more about the Symfony PHP framework
• See if I can get more staff members (besides myself) working with Drupal

DrupalCon Day 2

Drupal 8 is on its way. The target timeframe for the release is August 2013, which isn't too far off. Fortunately, the Drupal community continues to grow & improve its processes. As Dries pointed out in his Tuesday keynote, the heart of Drupal is not a specific technology, it's the community. The community's mission is to continue to innovate and collaborate using open source technology to build amazing user experiences. Drupal 8's headed in the right direction already, with a key focus being mobile-first. As such, output from D8 will be in HTML5, which, with the help of media queries, can ensure that the users get the content/functionality they need optimized for the device that they're using to access it. There's a huge push to get out-of-the-box Drupal to offer a robust content authoring experience, something it had only done through contributed modules before. Drupal 8 will also leverage the Symfony PHP framework, which is also a strong community-based open-source project. Like Drupal, it's modular. It's also well-tested and offers an architecture that the most innovative and high-level developers can look forward to working with.

There are so many ways in which the past 2 days have validated by belief that Drupal would serve as innovation platform for my organization for at least the next half decade, if not indefinitely. Drupal's very openness and the strength of its community results in constant evolution and adaptation.

Working with Drupal has made me more professional in my web work than I had ever been before. It keeps me on the cutting edge. I'm always learning from people building the most amazing sites on the web. There's a lot of big ideas that I bring back from Drupalcons, such as the need for agile development processes, community-driven and mission-driven (rather than specific product or service-driven) strategies to sustain an organization that can constantly innovate and adapt to changing circumstances.

Mitchell Baker, head of the Mozilla foundation (the nonprofit organization with a mission to keep web-based technologies open to all, rather than locked up by proprietary vendors) gave today's keynote (Wednesday, March 21, 2012). The video should be available online so you can hear her yourself. It was fascinating to learn how much Mozilla is doing and how it's doing its work (through a large & committed volunteer community as well as a broad workforce of developers). They're always seeking solutions to help all people build a better life online. Though we all think of Mozilla as the providers of the Firefox browser, they do many more things than that. They are utterly mission-driven, rather than simply being product and profit-driven. Again, this mission - similar to the mission of today's libraries - is to allow all people to create their best possible lives online. Mozilla, heck, open-source software itself is about empowerment and freedom. These are core tenets that all librarians can embrace.

Link to Drupalcon Keynote summary

Dries' keynote from Tuesday (first day of DrupalCon Denver) wrapped up nicely (& yes, you can view it again) & videotaped - see http://www.ostraining.com/blog/live/dries-keynote-from-drupalcon-denver/

Big takeaway, Drupal 8's gonna change the world & will be here in August 2013 - get ready! All the right things are happening - it'll be mobile-first, offer RESTful web servies, and better content authoring out of the box. Developers can look forward to leveraging the well-tested & proven Symfony PHP framework. (reusable, quality code, great community - like Drupal's - should bring new high-level developers into Drupal also).

Drupalists can fix anything

1st day at Drupalcon & I discovered that I'm not registered!!! So that means no early-bird pricing, so all that hustle I got on in what, late January, was for naught (worse still, since the state doesn't pay for a single dollar of professional development, all of the costs associated with this conference are out of my own pocket (and no, they really don't pay well enough for me to underwrite these extras, but I truly believe in what I'm doing... I may be wrong on this) ...

But it turns out that not only do the folks at the registration booth seem to feel empathy for my plight, they actually went into the transactional db (I think that's what they were doing) & found my transaction still in checkout process, not finalized - from a couple of months ago. Further, they were able to complete it. So, early bird pricing retained. Tears of frustration on a Tuesday morning averted (I'm tired enough that almost anything can make me cry right now - hoping Dries' keynote isn't too inspirational! ;) )

As a wonderful woman at registration pointed out, "we can fix anything".

And that's what I love about the Drupal system and - more importantly - the Drupal community. Would that I could bring that ethos, empathy, and helpful attitude back to all state agencies who have to deal with the public.

Maybe if we empowered those state workers with a system that allowed them to "fix anything"??

DrupalCon Denver v. Computer In Libraries

I arrived in Denver this evening, ready to join the DrupalCon attendees starting tomorrow. Unfortunately -- for at least these past two years in which I've been attending -- DrupalCon North America coincides with the Computers In Libraries conference. I miss CIL, but Drupal is complex enough that I need to attend as many DrupalCamps, Conferences, and meetups as possible. CIL usually leaves me wanting to do a million different things, but doesn't get as much into the details of how I can get them done. It also doesn't connect me with people who are professional web innovators outside of the library sphere. Given the "echo chamber" concers we've heard from thought leaders in libraries, that seems to be an important factor in DrupalCon's favor.
Drupal offers the framework, the toolkit, the community, and the skillset to build, support, and continue to iterate & improve on a library's digital branch. As a result, a lot of librarians find themselves making the same hard choice I did & many choose DrupalCon. The library "birds of a feather" sessions pack the rooms that they are held in at DrupalCons because so many librarians now attend. (This year, we're even having a library luncheon hosted by the amazing folks at Anythink libraries.)
It's unfortunate that so many librarians who would make up a prime CIL constituency (not to mention a potential pool of presenters) are forced to decide between the two. Maybe it was just bad timing and maybe in coming years the folks at InfoToday (or whoever may be in charge of choosing the dates) can talk with the Drupal Association & make sure that the two conferences aren't in direct competition. (It may or may not be possible, I don't know, but it would certainly be nice.)

Agile - Scrum

So I went to my first-ever scrum masters' user group in CT last night. I've been hearing a lot about the use of agile project management/development methodology in web work. Though we don't really have a team of developers at MPOW, we do have a lot of projects, particularly digital projects. I've personally found it challenging to run some of these collaborative efforts and have been searching for ways to improve my own processes.

If you've never heard of agile, here's a few starting references:

• The Agile Manifesto - http://agilemanifesto.org/ (I've always thought we should have an agile library manifesto... but maybe someone's done that already...)
• Agile software development on wikipedia
• Scrum, a particularly effective agile methodology that uses specific predefined principles & rules - conducted as sort of a game in a way, with rituals, rules, and roles that I'll try to describe (from my own layperson's perspective) in future posts
• An introduction to scrum

I think today's librarians have to increase the speed of technological adoption and adaptation. How do we do that? How do we run complex and collaborative projects efficiently in ways that are user-centered? These are the questions that make me seek out the professional developers. They've learned how to deal with the fast-changing world of technology. They've come up with strategies for developing services and software that are game changers. They've transformed their organizations into machines that innovate and evolve with the times. So I'm trying to glean what I can from them & bring it back to the world of the library and the governmental agency.

Yes, there's a lot of work to be done. The question becomes, how do we get it all done before the point is moot?

The Work of the New Librarian

An article that one of my brilliant library tweeps (sorry, can't remember who started it) pointed out recently - Google-Trained Minds Can't Deal with Terrible Research Database UI - from The Atlantic (see: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/google-trained-minds-cant-deal-with-terrible-research-database-ui/253641/#.T00oo737U_p.twitter ) makes me think that it's true - the work of today's librarians should be to expend more resources on improving the usability of the UIs our patrons have to deal with and fewer on telling our patrons that they need to work differently & here's how.

In order to improve UIs, we have to understand how they're built. Then we have to be able to fix them. At the very least, we have to close the feedback loop between our users and commercial database vendors. It's a mind-shift to go from saying here's the workaround & providing documentation on how to deal with a lousy experience to building a fix for the fundamental problem (it's been said before & again, sorry if I've failed to attribute it, I don't recall from whom I heard this wisdom 1st, but it's worth reiterating) - "it's not the user, it's the interface"! (nice blog post on ui principles at http://drupal.technicat.com/writing/ui.html)