Library WebHead

Going deep into the world of web development

2012-01-22T08:28:00.003-05:00

It’s been so long since I’ve blogged, I’m not even sure who’ll find & read this post! But it matters not. Half the time I think that I’m writing to better understand my own thoughts, so the process always yields something good.
For as long as I’ve been building out the library’s Drupal-based content management system, like for 2 years now, I’ve been struggling, caught between two worlds - the world of the library and the world of main-stream web design. I learn more from the latter. It’s harder facing the latter. I feel less expert and confident, but I really need to know how professionals get their work done. By professionals, sadly, I don’t mean folks with Library/Information Science degrees.
When I’m at DrupalCamps and DrupalCons - as I was yesterday (at DrupalCamp Western Mass.) - the presenters usually ask what your role with Drupal is. The choices are usually:

Drupal developer (concentrates on writing code, modules, structuring information, uber-geeky back-end stuff)
or a Drupal themer (someone who creates a design for the site, concentrating on the front-end look, feel, and usability. Though from the librarian’s perspective, this involves code work - in everything from CSS to basic php templating and jQuery (a javascript library) techniques.)

Sometimes, there’s a third category, for project managers or high-level managers who run web development shops.
Although a lot of folks who are free-lancers end up taking on all roles, they usually have a specialization that makes them identify themselves on one side of the spectrum or other.
So which are you, my library colleague - a front-end designer or a developer?
Or are you a project manager?
Did you learn how to do any of the above - I mean, really do them - in your Master’s degree program? I sure didn’t.
The web has leapt ahead while librarians weren’t looking. I’ve been trying to understand why. But in the meantime, I’ve had to expend most of my minimal resource of time on professional development that’s web-specific, rather than library-specific. So no, I’m not in Dallas at ALA Midwinter. Yes, I missed ALA, New Orleans in 2011. And yes, I miss the greater comfort I have with my colleagues in libraries - because I actually know them and where they’re coming from - it’s easier to interact and to feel confident. But in the past couple of years of web development learning, I’ve challenged myself more than I’ve ever done focusing on library-specific technology. Sorry to say.
It seems like the web world is something of a do-ocracy, but our world of professional librarianship is one of slow change, big theories, and a few baby steps forward at a time. It's structured, hierarchical, and slow moving. I don’t have time for that. I have to focus on learning how the pros do what they do so brilliantly & bring that back to my library. Let’s admit one thing - web developers been increasingly successful. We in libraries have not. Not that we aren’t great at what we’ve always done. Not that the people don’t need us. Not that there aren’t amazingly innovative libraries and people out there. But we just don’t have critical mass. There aren’t enough of us innovating and translating our high concepts about changing how we do business into reality.
A while back, I recognized that my library wasn’t going to get the money to hire its own web development firm every time we needed move forward, especially given the rate of change in technology and user expectations. It seemed to me that the closest thing we could come up with for a future-proof strategy was to understand, respect, and leverage the knowledge of professional web developers - basically, to become professional web developers ourselves. I wanted us to learn how to build and grow without needing to put in change orders every time we found usability issues in our online presence. We needed to close that feedback loop.
So that’s where I’ve been for the past year - going DEEP into the world of web development, rather than spreading myself around many technologies. And what I discovered - because I didn’t know how much I didn’t know - is that even in this technological area that librarians still lump together as being the realm of the "webmaster" or the "web librarian", practitioners have had to specialize in one aspect of the technology or another. There’s no way to do it all and do it in a way that allows us to evolve. The jack-of-many trades model isn’t scalable.
So why don't all libraries have teams with specialists in:

project management
content strategy / search engine optimization strategy
information architecture
development (code - functionality)
front-end design / user experience design / interaction design
system administration & architecture

Because make no mistake - ALL of what you're doing online is about the web these days. From the end users' perspective, your "online branch" is the website*. Although this branch gets far more use per year than your busiest bricks and mortar branch, your library is probably lucky to allocate as much as 1% of your staff resources to working on that branch.

(* From the end users' perspective, your catalog is your website and your website is your catalog. Same with digital collections. The main usability issues we'd identified at our library related to the lack of integration of those resources. Hence, the website is everything. It's where all of your resources need to come together. Users shouldn't have to know the difference in systems and staff responsibilities. The end result should all = the website, as it does in the users' minds.)

Killing Librarianship - Inspiration from the New England Library Association Conference

2011-10-05T09:31:00.000-04:00

I’ve spent the past couple days at the New England Library Association (NELA) conference in lovely Burlington, VT. The conference began with a rousing keynote from R. David Lankes, entitled “Killing Librarianship”. He spoke much more eloquently than I can summarize, so I encourage you to follow him on Twitter @rdlankes, read his work, and view his presentations - see http://quartz.syr.edu/rdlankes/ (to actually experience the keynote, go to http://quartz.syr.edu/rdlankes/blog/?p=1258).
For those who just want a summary, I’ll do my best.
Lankes explained that what threatens librarianship most is not Google, Amazon, or ebooks, but a lack of imagination. The new role of librarians is to support innovation, participation, and democracy, addressing some of our society’s most pressing needs. He summarized today’s librarianship in this formula:

Innovation + Participation + Democracy = Librarianship

He spoke about the death of innovation and big ideas in America (referencing Neal Gabler’s essay in the August New York Times - “The Elusive Big Idea)”. Lankes told us that the librarian’s role today (regardless of what it was yesterday and regardless of why a librarian may have entered the field in the first place) is to innovate and to support innovation. He also made it clear that this is every librarian’s responsibility. Referencing Gabler, he pointed out that innovative ideas are being destroyed by the commercial marketplace which too often requires innovators to find the fastest route to profit and extinguishes many great ideas in their early stages as a result. A prime example of this is the seed accelerator/venture capital model, wherein investors require internet startups to “pivot” to a new idea the moment the original concept is under threat of delay or profit estimates suddenly drop off. (You can imagine what would’ve happened had such a marketplace tried to invent the original internet.)
The public library invests in the marketplace -- not the marketplace of capital -- but the marketplace of ideas. The library allows its members (note the use of the term “members”, rather than “users” or “patrons”) to grow in their knowledge and understanding. This support allows people to bring the most important ideas -- not just the most immediately profitable ones -- to light.
Lankes also reminded us what a big idea our profession is. The public library is - in fact - one of the pillars of our democracy. To the extent that our public libraries are under threat of being cut or closed, our American democracy is threatened.

There is not such a cradle of

democracy upon the earth as the

Free Public Library, this republic of

letters, where neither rank, ofﬁce, nor

wealth receives the slightest

consideration.

- Andrew Carnegie

The public library allows our citizens to govern themselves more effectively by providing equal access to the information they need to support their decision-making. Those of us working in public libraries burdened by budget cuts, staff cuts, threats of closure, and members’ increasing needs (note that I use the term “members”, not “users”, or “patrons”, per Lankes), know that these cuts and closures cost our society dearly in the long run.
A session I attended on Net Neutrality on Monday underscored the current threats to the free exchange of information online and how we, as librarians, need to be actively involved in the fight to ensure that as many sources of information as possible are equally and freely available to all. A final session by Jessamyn West on Tuesday provided a checklist of how we can ready ourselves to help lagging community members bridge the Digital Divide(s) (there are several - economic, usability, and empowerment) that plague our nation.
To quote Lankes, “the Mission of Librarians is to Improve Society Through Facilitating Knowledge
Creation in Their Communities”.
This is indeed a big idea.
(So it sounds like I’d better get back to work - there’s a lot to do!)

Use of Web Technologies = Library Success!

2011-04-29T07:52:00.003-04:00

You must review the report just put out by the Library Research Service (a unit of the Colorado State Library) on the use of web technologies in libraries, which tells us that only 32% of libraries in 2010 had a Facebook page, but that the libraries who were "early adopters" of social media (those who had FB pages in their 1st 2008 study, for example), showed a significant increase in all traditional measures of library success - increased circulation, library visits, & program attendance - even when you adjusted for the levels of expenditure of libraries in the study.

A nice summary appears here: http://www.lrs.org/news/2011/04/28/new-closer-look-report-u-s-public-libraries-and-the-use-of-web-technologies-2010/
The full 56-page report / PDF is at http://www.lrs.org/documents/web20/WebTech2010_CloserLookReport_Final.pdf

On the Why Grow Coders from inside of Libraries question

2011-03-17T07:50:00.005-04:00

You have to take a look at this great Library Hat blog post on "Why Not Grow Coders from the Inside of Libraries?" Author Bohyun Kim's opening paragraph makes a compelling argument about the benefits of having in-house developers at libraries:

How fantastic would it be if every small library has an in-house developer? We will be all using open-source software with custom feature modules that would perfectly fit our vision and the needs of the community we serve. Libraries will then truly be the smart consumers of technology not at the mercy of clunky systems. Furthermore, it would re-position libraries as “contributors” to the technology that enables the public to access information and knowledge resources. I am sure no librarian will object to this vision. But at this time of ever-shrinking library budget, affording enough librarians itself is a challenge let alone hiring a developer.

Bohyun Kim (@bohyunkim) mentioned the difficulty of luring an IT professional into libraries. But at DrupalCon, I met several people who'd migrated into libraries from the world of "commercial web development". I know that this just anecdotal, but it reinforced other times recently when I've watched IT pros go into either libraries or state government from the commercial world. They were often pained by the pay cut, but in the current jobs environment (not to mention with the rising cost of healthcare and the outsourcing of IT), it may not be so hard to hire those IT folks after all.

On the flip side, I totally agree that those librarians who are so inclined, with enough of a technical background, could and should become developers. It would help libraries... a lot! Moreover, I think that the libraries should commit to providing resources and support for these staff. But we do, as a profession, derive a benefit from getting people from outside the library world to work with us. They give us new perspectives on the best way to do things. And there's a part of me that thinks that it may be easy for developers to come into libraries with the right skillset already in place and adapt their mindset, principles, and concepts to the library environment. Developers are used to working for all sorts of different agencies and organizations - everything from nonprofits and government to for-profit. If they're user-centered, they'll learn the library environment & be good additions to it, regardless of their background.

But what I wanted to point out most was what I feel the real issue is - a lack of vision and leadership in regards to the library's role and how technology plays into this vision. If you think that the library is nothing more than "books" (which is what most of the non-library-using world thinks it is - that's our "brand", if you will), then you wouldn't put resources into information technology. Instead, you'd expend time and create jobs (and whole departments) for aspects of handling those books.

And that's just what happened.

What we really need is to cement the vision of libraries as providing support for the community's information needs. And given that so much information is online (and, in fact, that we're putting it online) this commitment means that we need expertise in information technology. There are some library leaders who are committed to this. In some cases, they were committed enough to - like Darien Library - change the organizational structure to reflect their values. They've done away with the cataloging department and instead created a technologically-inclined user experience department. I don't mean to kill the sacred cow (and there are places where catalogers are still needed, but for most public libraries, honestly, they need to build better systems more than they need original cataloging).

But what do you think? I know it's a bit of the same old argument we've been making since (at least) the 1990s, but I think it's worth getting to the root of the issue and then establishing a way forward that will resolve that issue. To me, it means that all library directors have to buy into the need for (and complexity of) better technological support. Solutions include library directors supporting staff who want to code, integrating IT with all of the library, and hiring from the non-library world. There are a number of methods to deal with this problem. It's just that the people with the hiring power and the budget have to agree that it's a problem.

The Unintuitive Nature of Creating Intuitive Designs - Jared Spool Keynote Day 3 - DrupalCon Chicago

2011-03-10T23:01:00.003-05:00

Jared Spool was funny and right on, a great final keynote speaker for DrupalCon, reminding Drupal developers about how hard it is to create “intuitive” designs, but exhorting us to use several techniques that will help us achieve such designs. This long-time human factors engineer is truly a usability guru - he knows his stuff. When Spool speaks, all web developers/designers must listen... (content developers must listen, as well...)

Jason Samuels, who I met at DrupalCon & who was a fellow tweeter at the conference, has done a great writeup on this session at: http://goingtodrupalcon.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/jared-spool-keynote-speech-notes/

Also, take a look at the DrupalCon Chicago site to view the video of the keynote (not sure if it will remain at this url, but it is currently visible at http://chicago2011.drupal.org/live. It’s definitely worth it!

I’ll just give you my raw notes, because I don’t have a lot of time to post about everything I saw and learned here at DrupalCon Chicago. Hopefully, they’ll be helpful to someone.

Avis went against understood design patterns - * next to optional (v. required) fields... to avoid a senseless waste of asterisks!
learned unintuitiveness - the asterisk (now means required)

What is an intuitive design?

AIGA website in the 90s (Am Inst. of Graphic Artists) - “they built the damn thing in Flash” - created scrollbars in Flash, to keep visual integrity in place, but scrolling didn’t work well only went up 1 line of pixels at a time

the problem was that they didn’t understand how to build a scrollbar (which is actually really complicated, as simple as it sounds, it’s hard to do. Only like 7 people are left who know how to do this, but we don’t need to build new ones - it’s a done project, take it off the list... it’s perfectly functional, as is.) But AIGA built scrollbars from scratch, nonetheless and, of course, didn’t know how to build them so they created tremendous usability issues. This took focus off of the content and instead focused the user on the site’s unintuitiveness.

Intuitive design keeps user focused on their objective

It’s not noticeable. It’s invisible.

it’s not the novelty that makes something unintuitive... could you have an unintuitive design in a simple page?

YES...
found 1 a while back at the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture - Hay Net - how can you screw this up - very simple, you either need hay or have hay... but end-users didn’t know if you the link labelled “Need Hay” would give them list of people who needed hay or was for people who needed hay.

Intuitiveness has nothing to do with complexity vs. simplicity

it has to do with being invisible; if I have to take focus off what I’m trying to accomplish, I’ve lost intuitiveness

hard to put up pictures of good design - you don’t notice it

like air conditioning, only notice it if too hot or too cold

An intuitive design is personal, though, so we have to know about our users

ATM may be most intuitive thing we’ve designed; but there are confusing ones - 1 in India - 3 similar options: “Cash withdrawal”, “Fast cash”, “Ultra fast cash”
What does that mean?
could invent an unusable ATM - put everything on it, but in another language - but this is similar to this is often what we do with design

just look at anything Microsoft has ever designed - unintuitive (I think he played this one just for laughs - it worked... it was a good example from the Access 97 days, I think).

You would think after years of selling subway tickets, it would be simple to do, but as the photo of the fare card purchasing machines (& their instructions) shows, it’s not!

current knowledge is what they come to the design with

target knowledge is what they need to know to use design

so the difference between the two is called the “knowledge gap” -

only design for this gap... nothing above, nothing below

current knowledge should be = target knowledge for design to be intuitive

2 ways to fix gap:

1. train user (bring them up to target knowledge)

2. simplify design (bring design to them)

- ongoing cost option = training

options: training v. simplifying

Wang word processing machines in the late 70s - so much training required - paid $14K for A week-long course simply to load file, save file, and print file... The advanced course included italics and bold...

original Wordperfect - the little cardboard/keyboard templates to put around the function keys to show all of the features - so many features!
we go from raw technology to something with lots & lots of features (too many for most users) to simplicity... The one designed to be simple takes the prize (Microsoft Word v. Wordperfect in the early days of pcs / word processing programs)!
... then shift back to wanting more features
the same thing happens in hardware world

raw technology-->more & more features-->simplified experience

you can make the shift from features to experience

Problem with extra features is that they create a gap between current knowledge and target knowledge
users bring their own current knowledge to the table... they’re all over the map, though

multiple domains of knowledge, too... that’s what makes creating something intuitive REALLY HARD

What techniques can we use to make it easier?

used these techniques for years, very effective:

1. field visits - have the makers meet the customers (“Jane Goodall” experience)

1a. helps identify who the users are and their current knowledge

2. usability testing (not user testing, because not testing user, testing design)

3. quick tests:

- paper prototyping

- five-second tests

Handbook of Usability Testing is recommended book

paper prototyping - using their finger as a mouse (the original pointing device - "mouse classic")

shows us about flow

and if the labels that you’re thinking of are working

also recommends book Paper Prototyping, Carolyn Snyder

five-second tests (which you can do in 10 minutes) (5-seconds to memorize screen then write down all you remember about it & rate it)

just username/pwd, live chat boxes -

support cases - 8

challenge: watch users interacting with your design: at least 2 hours every 6 weeks

this is not rocket science

when upgrading to a more usable version - don’t bring the whole system down!

"Facebook has mastered the art of screwing with its users"

like your kitchen cabinets got all rearranged when you were sleeping - the usability fairies change everything - you didn’t ask for it, but they’ve decided to do it - the goal wasn’t to have a more efficient system, but to get kids off to school, which the new changes don't help with (beware of turning into the usability fairies)

destroying the users’ current knowledge

so how do we deal with this?
mitigate pain of change with bubbles, overlays to show what the new functionality is

but have to think about the process of designing for the change
design the process of change for the user base

we have to give them some control over this

- an intuitive design is invisible, personal, when the user is focused on their objective
- when current = target knowledge
- when design is focused on experience
- different users have different current knowledge
- you need to collect feedback about your users and their knowledge
- design for embraceable knowledge

spend at least 2 hours in the next 6 weeks to watch users interact with your design

Clay Shirky's Keynote Presentation

2011-03-10T00:57:00.004-05:00

I loved Clay Shirky's keynote (see: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/live)
He reminded all of the web developers in the room that "the most valuable thing attached to a computer is the user" and covered the new "C's" in CMS (not just Content, but) Community, Convening, Culture. He believes that we're moving into Community Management Systems (vs. Content Management Systems) and, further, that these are evolving into cultural management systems. People who work in libraries, museum, and governmental agencies should be participating in movements like the open-source Drupal community, if for no other reason than that [my aside].
I know that there were those tweeting during the keynote about how this was just a rehash of the old Web2.0 paradigm that we've been hearing about for nearly a decade, but I think Shirky added some new pieces to the discussion and refocused the Drupalists on how we build our systems.
1. he challenged web developers' conception of the user
Shirky pointed out that we often develop for personas, as though people behave consistently - always good or bad, for example. He mentioned what psychologists term "the fundamental attribution error", wherein we see others' actions as though they are a distillation of everything about those people (so when they behave in destructive ways on some occasions, we imagine that they are always destructive) vs. seeing them, as we see ourselves, that is to say, behaving due to context and circumstances. (e.g., when I cut off that person in traffic, I was rushing to the hospital, but when someone else did, they were showing how selfish and narcissistic they were).
This does remind us that the use of "personas" - and our design for personas can actually have a negative flip side, in having us design systems for "people" who we imagine behave in certain ways all the time. The scenarios we put those personas in are more important. The context is crucial in figuring out how to build systems to work best for people. Which brought us to his second challenge:
2. he spoke about targeting behavior as a 1st-class object
As we build community systems, we have to build them to accommodate behaviors, not single-dimensional personas. We have to build systems that reinforce the behaviors we want and reduce the effects of behaviors we don't want. He used the example of del.icio.us and how, as the social bookmarking service was designed, there were debates over how it might be mis-used. Sure enough, many of the designers were concerned about the possibility of spammers bookmarking spam sites & gaming the system until those bookmarks were highlighted, reducing the value of the community tagging of sites. But they decided that as long as they built the system to not allow those spammy bookmarks to rise to the top, it didn't matter if spammers were using the service. If there's spam on the system, but none of the real community is affected by it, does it matter?
Through the social aspect of the bookmarking system, they actually leveraged the greater number of community members - who wanted to use the system legitimately - and used their collective input to highlight which tagged sites were valuable. In choosing this approach, they stopped themselves from designing onerous barriers to legitimate community members which they would've had to include if they were designing more heavily around the "spammers". Instead, they concentrated their efforts on a system that would enhance/highlight the legitimate behaviors of the many and reduce the effects of the illegitimate behavior of the few.
3. he talked about including users in redesigning the system as we go
This one isn't so revolutionary - you've heard it a million times nowadays. There's two parts of this statement: (1) that you include the community in building the system and (2) that you build iteratively. The bit that he added in that I personally hadn't thought of (in this way) before was about how you can't pre-design the system for the user. It's real-time use that shapes how you build. You'll never be able to fully anticipate how people are going to use what you provide, so instead of pre-designing for all of the edge cases, you need to design the system with community input and more importantly, design a system that easily enhanced/changed/redesigned in response to community demands.
Along the way, Shirky also pointed out some interesting things about organizations & organizational culture - that, for example, successful open-source movements are led by people who might be described as "benevolent dictators". In other words, they neither micromanage, nor are they simply charismatic visionaries, the leadership options we so often see in the corporate world. Instead, they are "roadblock clearers" whose commitment to the continuation of the community trumps the disputes that inevitably arise when there are so many impassioned developers involved.
He spoke about Linux's creator Linus Torvalds, who, at one point did source control by having community members send their work zipped via email to him and he redistributed it via email. He did so until he could find a technical solution that "fit" the linux community's culture. So he cleared the roadblock, kept things going until he ultimately resolved the dispute with a technology that fit into their community practices.
He also said that in such impassioned communities, what worked best was for the communities to have a space to "take it to a room" for debates, without affecting the development of the project overall. So online spaces for such communications are crucial infrastructure for open-source movements.
He pointed out the difference between what's been called "single-loop organizations" and "double-loop organizations". The former, he said, fix problems; double-loop organizations, however, fix problems and the situations that cause the problem.
He didn't say that the open source movement was definitely going to survive and persist and that it would all work out. Instead, he said that the people at DrupalCon (and active in other open source communities) represent "the experimental wing of political science".
I think that the endless feedback loop of the community with its resulting "continuous, iterative improvement", the participation of believers who are most impassioned about the project (along with the space for other folks, who may be less involved, but whose contributions may nonetheless be helpful) will ensure the continued success of the amazingly powerful, open-source Drupal project. I think Dries, and so many others who've gotten involved, are correct to emphasize the community aspect of their work.
Being here, right now, with the Drupal community, gives me a lot of hope about the future.

Organization of Intention

2011-03-09T11:57:00.009-05:00

So awhile back, I posed the question about centralization vs. decentralization when it comes to systems - which is better?

I’ve just been in a great keynote by Clay Shirky given here at DrupalCon Chicago. In it, he spoke about how those great old concepts of Web2.0 are playing themselves out and what our challenges we face as website developers moving forward. I’ll summarize it in a separate post - it’s worth a whole post. But bottom line, we have to stop considering the audience the audience, but rather as collaborators. We have to cede control of our web presence to the community of users.

So you’d think I’d be all about having everyone just do everything. But what I’ve been watching - both in the larger world and more close to home - is the political power of organizing intention. The less empowered, the less resourced you or your organization is, the more important it is for you to rely on community and to bring the community together. So, when it comes to the question of centralized, high-control systems vs. lots of little grassroots projects that don’t even know about one another, neither is ideal (in most cases). Instead, depending on context (which is key in an analysis of needs), most systems work best when they facilitate collaboration. That’s the key. It’s not whether or not the system itself is centralized or decentralized. It’s whether or not the system helps people to work together, leverages and harnesses their strengths, empowers them at an appropriate level. Importantly, those who are empowered have to work together, within certain parameters. That's the only way it all works. That's why there are legal systems and governance in complex societies.

A lot of times with library systems we make a huge mistake. We have databases, “digital collections”/archives/repository systems, a catalog, a website, some web2.0 tools. And these don’t work together. They’re under the control of different people. Each of those people is an advocate of their little world and in control of their little world. But they aren’t sharing with others. Often times, they’ll create a little blog on the side because they’re nervous about the high control folks saying no. All of those constructions can only be fractionally successful, at best. They are unsustainable without the one or two people who are behind them. They are really constructions of ego. They are built of fear. Fear of loss of control. I empathize, I really do, but I also see the negative results of diffusing our efforts. I see it in poor user experiences. If you want the end user to support your larger organization, you have to harness your efforts with the efforts of the larger organization. And if you're not supporting the larger organization, then who are you working for? On the flip side, the technology should be supporting us as staff to be empowered to innovate. And empowerment of staff can lead to great innovation. It's just that we need to harness all of this - we need to have collaboration, communication, and agreement about our overall mission.

With the many little independent projects, neither harnessed nor collaborative, there is no overall sense that we are creating what either the user or the organization needs to fulfill their goals. The scaffolding of all of these endeavors must be collaboration. The construction must be worked on together. We have too few resources - too few people and too few funds for little fiefdoms.

And yes, Drupal is a technology designed to help us harness and empower the collective staff intentions in service of users’ needs.

Wrapup of Webform module session

2011-03-08T21:45:00.004-05:00

This session was a great introduction to the Webform (contributed) module for Drupal. It also showed those of us who've looked at Webform the awesomeness of Webform 3 and how well it plays with not only Drupal 6, but Drupal 7. (btw, link to the Webform project page is http://drupal.org/project/webform)

Personally, I find a few things particularly great about Webform for my library's use (not specific to Webform 3, also true of earlier versions):

webform will allow my colleagues to easily make forms and polls/surveys (of whatever complexity they want, with many possible methods for data collection) without them ever having to come close to code
webforms created using this system will be more secure than we might come up with from scratch - keeping our form creation activities from opening up new security holes on the server... also, can apply form spam blocking techniques (such as the use of CAPTCHA or Mollom modules)
that it actually offers at least as much functionality and ease-of-authoring and data collection as SurveyMonkey, but gives us a lot more flexibility

My notes are found below (BTW, some rockin' new aspects of Webform 3 are highlighted - take note!):

Webform 3
Nathan Haug
“quicksketch” on d.o. - Lullabot Consulting, Development, training

Webform
- the tool for making surveys on Drupal
- easier to use than CCK
-- no it’s not based on CCK
-- no it’s doesn’t use Entities in D7
- designed for end-users, not administrators (people who just want to make a survey)
- many-to-few method of collecting data - many fill out form, just a few receive the results/submissions
- not a data creation tool, but users can see their own submissions, if you’ve granted them that permission

New Features in Webform 3
- ability to have conditional logic - can show fields / multi-pages based on what the answer to previous questions were submitted (so many people who aren't in development have no idea how difficult this functionality can be to add in... but now anyone can do it!)
- user can now save drafts & resume later
- you can webform-enable for any content type
- basic Views module support (a good start, not fantastic/fully implemented yet)
- much better data integrity - info is stored in the db more efficiently & makes it usable by Views
- Form Builder Integration* (http://drupal.org/project/form_builder) - which will blow your mind! ;)

Holy APIs!
- module-provided components - additional fields (E.g., a grid field full of text fields in web form, similar to cck)
- more hooks (for save/insert/update/delete submission)
- hooks for pre-built select lists (heading toward Views integration for select lists)
- renderables used in forms, e-mails, and viewing submissions, even in D6

Webform 3 v. 2
- shorter node form - just title, body, all settings elsewhere - 1st save node, only then there will be a webform tab on top of node - then you can click on the Webform tab to do settings like email
-- save node 1st! then make web form in Webform 3
-- in webform tab, there’s a form components tab, an emails tab, a form settings tab
-- can send out templated email response / confirmation upon submission of webform - tokenized

Excellent tools for getting data out of Webform 3 - including basic analysis capabilities built in
- Basic analysis tools built in

- Table view of form submission data

- Downloadable form submission data
This is AWESOME! Bye bye Survey Monkey!!!

Date module & jquery ui on your D6

You can use date popup calendar ui in form

showed Webform 3 off in Drupal7 environment - still has popup calendar, doesn’t need Date module and jquery ui native to D7

Can skip page if none of the components show up in a given page - conditional logic coolness

Payment systems - combo of Pay module & Webform 3 module
can map fields to payment component - payment gateway
(of course with all cautions about implementing using HTTPS)

Form Builder
system to make it really easy for users to build and construct forms
creates kind of a wysiwyg looking interface for building webforms
drag and drop fields, then add the fields’ attributes
ability to add check boxes - by adding the Options Element module - ability to easily define lists of things

webform has basic token capabilities, so can take advantage of logged in username info, for example - e.g., %username - can do this with any core profile fields the user has...
you can hook into the webform_components from other modules webform_webform_components

how to handle form spam - CAPTCHA or Mollom modules - make sure you’re using latest versions of webform and mollom - Mollom now allows you to natively add Mollom protection to any form
NEVER expose a webform to the public if without this type of form spam protection

other cool things you can potentially do / combine with Webform:
- check out Webform integrations listed on project page
- mime mail module - to send html emails to users (so they look like my website/can embed images, for example)

can you populate select list from db table?
- can load prebuilt select list coming from some php - only way to handle this currently is to create a module that hooks into webform webform_options - but pretty simple-looking to do

is webform3 generating html5-compatible code for things like email? not currently
Elements module makes sure you have html5-compatible elements

is the arrange fields module compatible with form builder? two different interfaces, so prob should work together, but doesn’t know, hasn’t tried it

Exhausted - Day 1 of DrupalCon Chicago

2011-03-08T21:18:00.004-05:00

So I’m totally toasted. Today was the first full day of DrupalCon Chicago, beginning with Dries Buytaert’s (the creator of Drupal) keynote, explaining his vision, doing a recap of what went wrong and what went right in the creation of Drupal 7 which went into full production in January (he said that Drupal 8 development begins today and set out some goals for this project in the address also). Dries reminded those who’ve been on this journey for any part of the last decade what they should be proud of the work that they've done and he welcomed those of us who are newer to the journey, and - throughout his address - he reaffirmed our choice to be involved with a project that’s not just a technological platform, but a community!

Approximately 3,000 attendees are here for DrupalCon Chicago. There are other, even more impressive numbers that were given in the keynote highlighting Drupal’s exponentially expanding influence on the web today. It looks like over a million sites - almost 2% of the entire web are now Drupal-based. The largest enterprises and governments down to the most humble not-for-profit or individual websites are built on Drupal, a testament to its flexibility and scalability. And not only has Drupal grown so much, but that growth appears to be ever-accelerating. In fact, that may be the one danger, per Dries, that the Drupal community has to grapple with most in the coming years - the growth of the community.

http://goingtodrupalcon.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/drupal-opening-keynote/. Also, a video of Dries’ keynote appears at http://chicago2011.drupal.org/live

It’s Dries' message of empowerment that so appeals to me. I want to similarly empower my colleagues. I’m trying to migrate us to a Drupal system that will allow them - brilliant as they are in their areas of subject matter expertise - to really shine. I’m building a stage, a backdrop, a sound system, and lighting. It should be a showcase for them, not a distraction. But at the same time, I know that my process hasn’t been as open and communicative as it needs to be. I need to be sitting down with my colleagues weekly to discuss the project, get input, and make sure that what I’m building is what will work for them and the people that they will be building the content for - I want to provide them with scaffolding that supports the construction of a better user experience.

In today’s library BOF (Birds of a Feather) session, I was impressed with the quality and breadth of some of the development happening in the library world. In many cases, professional developers are being hired and in some cases libraries seem to actually be fleshing out digital experience departments (including graphic designers, developers, information architects, and multimedia producers). We're so far beyond the concept of a "webmaster" in this day and age that teams are definitely a must for libraries that want to have true "digital branches". (Sadly, even at MPOW, which has more advantages and staff than the average small public library in our state, they have only one person whose time is dedicated to web work,... and I never started out as a web developer, either, so it's not like MPOW can claim to have even 1 true "developer".)

But hearing about the work happening at these other libraries gives me hope.
All libraries should be at least as far along as the people in that DrupalCon Library BOF were. Seriously. We need to identify, and - more importantly - to FIX the problems that we have with our library systems. Stop dividing up the systems - online, to the user, all of the aspects of the librarys’ digital presence are seen as “the library’s website”. That’s how we have to treat them.

If we need further help to achieve this - in the form of consultants, Drupal firms, what-have-you, we have to try and get pony up the funds to make it happen.

Just a thought from a very tired person in Chicago, whose feels extraordinarily grateful to be in on this whole Drupal thing!

Notes From "Designing for Content-Rich Websites" DrupalCon Chicago preconference

2011-03-07T23:26:00.003-05:00

Designing for Content-Rich Websites

Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering

Lots of folks in-house who have large, content-rich sites that have grown organically through time (drupal.org, e.g.) & are hearing from users that things aren’t as easy to find as they should be.

There’s 8 types of pages you can find on a website today. Users behave very specifically on certain types of pages vs. others, but most people don’t realize this:

1. Content
2. Gallery
3. Department
4. Store
5. Home
6. Search page
7. Search results page
8. Categories (search) page.

Finally, will talk about search & role it plays on your site.

The Best Content draws itself to the user - “it must suck” - (by which we mean the content sucks itself to the user)
* designing for “scent” is more successful than designing for navigation (theory was successfully tested that people’s behavior in searching for info is like an animal hunting for food...”scent”)
the more experience you have with a given technology the more successful you are with the technology - so assumed that anyone with a lot of web experience would have an easier time than people who were new to web, UIE tested these more experienced web people, but found that it had nothing to do with amount of experience - only with sites - some sites all people, regardless of experience, were successful; on some sites no one was successful - it had to do with scent
the scent is MOST important - the design is most important (designing for scent)
* every link gives off scent that users follow
“trigger words” were important to allowing user to find what they wanted (user didn’t even mention word “drivers”, but this was a trigger word for them for finding drivers)
* NO EVIDENCE THAT THE 3-CLICK RULE IS RIGHT!!!! In fact, many, many (30 even) clicks are fine, as long as the “scent” is good

Search Engines are scent-less
* users click on them when they don’t see a link with good scent
* they type in the words they wanted in the link
* we call them trigger words
* users are trying to make their own scent
* except they don’t know if the designers have anything that matches the trigger words
Search boxes should be labelled “BYOL” - Bring Your Own Link.
User hopes that search engine will figure out what designers missed
* Poor scent - iceberg problem - people don’t bother to scroll when they are assuming that what’s above the fold is the same as what’s below the fold

Banner ad problem - “banner blindness” - because of so many ads, people don’t even look at that top area of page where ads were so often displayed

When people search, they really search:
* >24K results - with “relevancy” which was terrible because people blocked out “lower relevancy” links

Users know how the scent is working - represented by confidence
We can’t measure “scent” directly - no good way to measure it
- have to wait until we hear someone ask about something (E.g., popcorn example)
- we can’t look at a link & say it has good scent - but we can watch users & see if they’re confident - if they have great confidence in link, shows good scent

Users do “information masking” - learn which parts of page to look at and ignore
Often the things that prevent our design = policies (vs. users’ needs)

Navigation panels are often scentless
- Scent is specific, navigation panels are not
- Amazon forces you into search (author, title search works fine for just those things, but not for many needs, such as, for a specific character’s name (within a book or series, for example) or other aspects, such as is the story scary, not so good)
- the categories, e.g., in Dr. Koop’s site - so vague, hard to choose which one to use - category “resources” completely vague/meaningless & because it was third-party bought glossary, put under “resources” because not their own stuff, but user wouldn’t know that
- (FAQ might be: what’s the deal with ejournals, “research databases”, “library catalog”, “finding aids”, “digital collections”... “what’s where? how do I find it? how do I get it?”
- Fidelity website - “Research”, “Retirement”, “Planning” - meaningless to regular people, but in financial services industry, those terms have standard understood meanings, but it’s jargon for others
- it's jargon if a small group of people have very specific meanings for usage of terminology but terms are used more broadly or differently in the general population (librarians, here’s our “database” problem... well, one of them)

Short links don’t emit scent
- average link success = 42% (so anything above 45% = excellent scent)
- best links are 7-12 words... short links don't emit scent...w/link text & associated text included - most successful links are 7-12 words in length
- trigger word not in shorter links (it’s a probability game, fewer words in link, less likely to see trigger word in it) (let’s not even talk about the “click here” link wording which is utterly meaningless -- poor usability and accessibility)
- but too many words in link text = trigger word buried
Other issues with scent
- too many similar links in Kraft Foods site navigation example, so didn’t know which to choose “recipe search” v. “recipe connection”
- CNN site - is a story “U.S.” vs. “World”? but at least putting links underneath each category - provides example / trigger words in those links, so it wasn’t the broad category, it was the examples that made the navigation work in those cases
- put links under categories to strengthen scent = good technique, works well
- interesting example of very old Pfizer site - tons of links to “financial” and to “FunZone”, hard to tell what site’s really for - not what you expect - there was a great subsite, called “Dealing with Depression”, but no easy links from Pfizer main site to get to the “Dealing with Depression” - originally, there was a link from that home page, but it was only on that page for two weeks - every two weeks, had to change homepage - corporate site policy must keep home page “links fresh” because we know most people must go to Pfizer site daily and might get bored if they don’t...

Short pages reduce scent
- users have no trouble scrolling! long pages are not necessarily a problem
- the problem with users not scrolling only relates to the design of the page - if it looks like it stops at a certain point, they won’t continue scrolling. For example:
- large margins at bottom of page = stop scrolling
- if horizontal line = stop scrolling
- you need one long column v. others, means people will keep scrolling, but if it looks like they all end at the same point, won’t scroll past that point
- copyright statement = stop scrolling

if scent gets more general, instead of more specific, user gets lost - so links should be specific, example of old etrade site link where it implied that the link would take the user directly to information about their qualifications for program, but it just took them from more specific promo page to the etrade home page, - this led to user frustration

The site map is what people click on when they’ve given up hope. “Site Map” has no scent.

Scent depends on context
* example, misinterpreted context - from Boston.com’s “The Boston Red Sox” page, link to “Sports Calendars” didn’t bring them to calendar with Red Sox games, but rather to calendars for other things.
Users don’t think in terms of sections!!! Designers think in terms of sections (re: who’s in charge of building sections)

Traditional approach to website design has been to think of home page first, then link out to individual pages, but that’s only the way you design for navigation, which is low on scent.
Instead, to design for scent, start with a target content page.
- figure out from where users will likely want to get to that page
- put links in all the places people would most likely want to find your content

DON’T START DESIGNING YOUR WEBSITE WITH HOME PAGE - IT’S THE LEAST IMPORTANT PAGE ON YOUR SITE! THE MOST IMPORTANT PAGE IS THE ONE THAT HAS THE THING THE USER’S LOOKING FOR! START DESIGNING FROM SPECIFIC CONTENT!!!

Min = 2 hours every week that you should be watching people use your design. Interview users for most important content.

Good Design = Users Have High Confidence
- every design element that makes scent stronger contributors to the user’s confidence
-- before they click, these things make them feel confident:
--- link quality, navigational graphics, information organization
-- after they click, they will have confidence if they are:
--- seeing desired info
--- or more, stronger scent

Summary:
Your Content Must Suck
- your content must give off scent
- scent is about pulling the user to the content
To make Your Content “Suck”, you need to know:
-- why users are coming to the site
-- what their trigger words are
-- where are they likely to look
- avoid search as answer
- keep links and pages long
- you can’t design great sites without testing
- spend time with users
* users need strong scent to find their content
* as users work their way through the site, they encounter different types of pages
-- each type helps them in a different way
* key user behaviors predict navigation failure
-- designers can use these behaviors to learn how to improve the site

Going Over the Different Types of Pages (and associated patterns of user behavior):

1. “Target Content” Pages
Users Seek Content
* the target content page is the most important page on the site - nothing else matters to that user at that time but that content
* all other pages are dedicated to delivering the user to the target
(v. old myth of “surfing” a site - which was just that, a myth - they don’t care about the rest of your site)
* navigation pushes users
* scent pulls users
There’s always a task.
There’s always a page that fulfills that task - it’s what we call “the target content page”
Has the info the user’s looking for. Most important page on website, dictates failure or success of user.
Getting user from home page to content page = scent issue

2. “Gallery” Pages
List of links to content pages - enough scent has to come through those links to get us to the correct gallery page.
Ecommerce sites are simple. Users want to buy something, website builders want to sell something - they both meet their goals at the same instance. So used as the “laboratory rat” of testing how to design things.
That’s why we call them “gallery pages” - because of ecommerce - display of all of the shirts, for example, at clothing store site.
But there are non-ecommerce, content-rich sites. Still, they have gallery pages.
Content Galleries
* behave same as ecommerce galleries
* content pulls users towards it

Predictors of failures of scent:
1. Forcing the Back Button (designers said, you have to go back if you’re seeing this page) - a sign of failure = back button usage
when they used back button, only succeeded 18% of time (v. 42% w/o use of back button), if user had to use the back button 2 x, their success rate drops down to 2%
The back button is the button of doom!!!
2. Pogosticking - when user bounces between levels of the info hierarchy
* pogosticking PREVENTS success - when you do that only succeed 11% of time (vs. 55% of the time w/o “pogosticking”)
3. Search
* search also prevents success - if search is used, they are only successful 30% of the time (vs. w/o using search, which = success 53% of time)
So...
a successful gallery page doesn’t force the user to use back button, to pogostick, or to search

when users tell you something is “cluttered”, it’s code for - you’ve got a lot of stuff, but none of it’s what I’m looking for...
been in many projects where adding info reduced users’ perception of clutter.

Link order is important
* random order & alphabetical order are essentially the same from the users’ perspective on almost all things:
only in specific names (e.g., of cars, states, people), is alphabetical order sensible

The length of a gallery page doesn’t matter!
Longer pages work better
(See all on one page in Lands’ End allowed more sales of items that would’ve been in the 4th, 5th, 6th pages when they didn’t have the “see all” option)
Get into trouble when there’s too many concepts/”ideas” in a gallery... it’s not that there’s too many items, it’s just that it’s hard to figure out which type of item I want

3. Department pages
Departments divide things up - reduce set of choices
have to clearly know what you want and also which categories you definitely don’t want
often put departments into navigation - but now, if have like “account management” and “bill and payment informaton”, which one of these links do you use?
Global navigation turns out to be really useless for people - we’ve trained users that global navigation is useless
People think in terms of local navigation
Very few people do second things on a website. They get the task done & leave the page.

division by audience issue - cancer site - the public read the doctors’ side & the doctors’ read the general publics’ side.
should’ve been clearer about what was meant - not “for patients” vs. “for doctors”, instead should’ve said “written in plain-language” vs. “written in doctor-speak” (or something like that) - that was the real difference between the links

For Department pages to be successful
- reduce the number of choices in galleries
-- to allow galleries to provide more detail per item
- gallery links are descriptive
-- trigger words are present
- categories need to be logical
-- users need to quickly eliminate uninteresting categories
-- users don’t mind if there’s 20 ways to get to the page they want, as long as it’s the target content that they want

Links Must be Meaningful
- marketing terminology/jargon can block scent
- context helps a lot
- also use of specific links as an example of the category

4. Store pages (400,000 pages or more - VERY LARGE websites)
- completely eliminate some aspect of site from users (like MEGA-departments)
- it’s ok to include the path to “men’s” OR the path to “shoes” to get to men’s shoes
- stores must be familiar (JCPenney, Petsmart, CNN) - and competitors all use very same words/terminology

5. Home page (is special)
- the landing page of the site
-- whether type in url or get there from Google search
- aggregates either stores or departments
- home page may simply be a gallery page, or department page
- 1 purpose & 1 purpose only, to get users to the content they want - best of all, to have that target content on the home page itself
-- primarily the category page
-- divide real estate accordingly
- home page is the LEAST important page on your website
- home page plays the smallest role

no language to describe design for everyone, terminology “information scent” is best terminology we have come up with

[Note to self: try out Instapaper - takes large sections off website & view offline / on cell phone]

Faceted search isn’t really search - categories create scent - if it works, has great scent...
Search is actually the only way to deal with the long tail of least used content
But the content used by the majority of users is where you design architecture for
Getty images doesn’t consider every picture to be equal
There is such thing as most important content - it’s contextual though, e.g., with Getty images, by season, by current events issue

User study:
Pauline - senior citizen, fell, hurt hip, recovering - needs meals delivered. Niece living in another city trying to go online to find help
Went to New York City municipal website to find out about meal delivery, but nothing to help (16 links, but none helpful) - link labelled “Online services” then “All”, then “page 6” - at very bottom of very long page - “Senior Programs Locator” (would get her 1/2way there).
Department of Aging
search results “in wonderful alphabetical order, exactly the order she needs...”
why did they build out a database like that - “to reduce number of calls” but didn’t really work out, since the records in the database didn’t answer important questions & just dead-ended the user - so they would have to call to get what they needed. Waste of resources to put a database like that online.

- search engine logs - keywords - is a list of links you should have on your website

- division of screen real estate on a page should reflect the most important / heavily sought content

on avg site home page, users:
go to search 6.8% of the time
use category links 86.8% of the time,
“featured content” links 1.3% of the time
home page link on home page 2.6% of the time
so why give so much space to “featured content” (e.g,. “hero boxes” - the giant slideshow boxes displaying what marketing/company wants to show off) vs. category links?
instead, should give 86.8% of space to category links...

Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site
demo of cell phones gallery pages - which info is shown there
- which design works best?
Lesson #1: Provide meat - information to help people decide whether or not to pursue link further
scent of information - content ages emit scent through links
users scan pages for trigger words
Lesson #2: What makes each link different?
How will someone tell the difference between each link - this is especially a problem with fully automated gallery generation pages
don’t confuse the value of the content with the presentation of the content
Lesson #3: Support Selection
3 stages for decision making:
1. winnowing - reduce candidates to a smaller set (dept. page level)
2. selecting - (gallery level)
3. validating - (content page level)
Gallery pages are for selecting, so make pages clear
Lesson #4: Will Users Understand Individual Elements?
Lesson #5: Provide Necessary Distinguishers
Lesson #6: What do the users already know? (keep in mind that you live & breathe this content every day, so what seems like normal language to you may be jargon)
Lesson #7: Provide for Individual Needs
- e.g., sorting capabilities by various features
- gallery doesn’t have to be a list, could be presented on a map, if information is most usefully presented that way
Lesson #8: Take Advantage of Available Real Estate
Visual Design & Copy
Lesson #9: Take Advantage of Progressive Disclosure
- take advantage of available real estate
-- progressive disclosure can help for dense information
Lesson #10: Think Beyond the List-O-Links Approach
- tables are not a requirement
-- can use embedded links in paragraphs when appropriate
- good copy is essential
- design for the user’s objective
- good to show what an item does NOT have
- we want to think that we can just create the shell and hand off the content to someone else to populate it
- good design is often a team activity. You need to be able to sit in the same room and have a conversation (content folks & website admins)
Lesson #11: Will People Understand Your Terminology?
Lesson #12: Avoid Meaningless Noise Words
Lesson #13: Good Copy is Essential
Lesson #14: Design for the Specific Use
Lesson #15: Take advantage of associated text
- turn a gallery page into a content page by adding more info into the gallery page - e.g., staff directories - make users happy
- supportive info about the listing that you’ll be linking to
- NY Times has editors create summary statements, instead of computer-generated associated text - makes for better listing
Lesson #16: Humans Trump Programs
Lesson #17: Realize the Impact of Changes
Lesson #18: Order links from most likely to least likely to be wanted/related
Lesson #19: Group related links together
Lesson #20: Avoid chronological order (again, in most pages)
Lesson #21: Know when alphabetical order makes sense (usually only for specific names)

Designing Galleries for Selecting:
- ensure you understand what’s important to the users
- how will you differentiate one link from another
- how will you prevent pogosticking?
- take advantage of good copy, thoughful ordering, and matching the design to the user’s objective
Lateral Links on Content Pages:
- like “customers who bought this item also bought” on Amazon
Lesson #22: Lateral Links allow users to continue the adventure
- choice is value-added - you can get similar item with fewer or more features - give users more choices
Lesson #23: sometimes 1 choice is all you need
Lesson #24: “more” “previous” and “next” are noise
next & back or previous & next aren’t very strong info-scented, doesn’t give you a great idea of what you might get
Lesson #25: look for opportunities to provide more scent
a “curated section” - overview pages with lateral links
Lesson #26: Find Ways to Eliminate Poor Candidates
Lesson #27: Faceted Winnowing Eliminates “No Results”
Lesson #28: Look at Interactive Controls for Filtering
letting people dynamically filter (with sliders for example)
Lesson #29: A Good Demo Doesn’t Imply Usable
but you’ve got to test with users & see if it actually works with them
Don’t let Flashy Overtake Useful
Lesson #30: Don’t Forget the Basics: Selection is Key
Good Design is Delightful and Useful
It’s only a “target content” page if they find what they’re looking for... if they’re moving through multiple pages, that “content page” is really a “gallery page”

every so often, take last 4 weeks of content & do a group sort
how would NY Times have done it & talk through it?
everybody gets to play the game...
interesting discussions
another fun game - if we wanted to make this really suck what would we do?
we don’t yet have a language about what makes “good design” vs. “bad design”, so need to have these conversations
to create a language of design amongst team members
the notion of critique is missing in a lot of shops - you should do critiques like they do in art school...
2 pieces to critique:
1. sense of where you’re trying to go - what do you want page to do? what’s the call to action?
2. what did you do to do that?

Search, Scent and the happiness of pursuit
this AM, talked about how search fails users frequently
we don’t realize how bad it is because we use Amazon

Browsers vs. Searchers
we expected “natural searchers” would automatically use search across all sites - studied this. There were natural browsers, but no natural searchers across all sites. The site’s design forces users to Search.
aha moment = this is why library users were so unhappy with library catalogs.
We fronted all catalogs with web pages to talk about various books, collections, etc. or else we didn’t. And no one wanted to use straight search with no context.

Getting from Home to Content
6.8% of people prefer to use search off top to get from home page to content pages - it’s just a design phenomenon
but worse, only 7.5% of searches occur from home page
23% of search = from search results page
so people only use search when they get lost

Users search from the page where they lose the scent - already in problem recovery mode
people actually search completely different ON a site than they do AT Google - because AT the site, they expect level of specificity and context that they don’t get at Google level

Items easy to find with search:
- books by Tom Clancy
- a Canon SD1100
Items HARD to find with search:
- the 1st Tom Clancy book featuring Jack Ryan
- an inexpensive, but high quality SLR camera
success of search depends on what they’re searching for

users don’t want to search, but not all content searches equally well
User Expectations of Home Link placement (study from Wichita University) - most people expected home links at top left-hand corner (& bottom left, to much lesser degree)
expected search box somewhere in top right-hand side
none of these positions make it harder to use the search box - if it looks like a search box, they search in it (not about where it’s placed, but what the box looks like)

Type of Results
- match relevant type = has the user’s target cotnent = best
- relevant = strong scent to user’s target content = good
- irrelevant (Wacko) - unrelated to the user’s target content
-- relevance is perceived by the user
-- completely unrelated from the user’s perception
- no results - target content does not exist on the site (but it really does)
-- mistakenly given when search can’t find target content
-- faceting prevents the “no results” search outcome - hence its utility

Great search results
- avoid pogosticking
-- it’s not about choices, it’s about the right content
- make sure match relevant results are at top
- eliminate wacko results
- make sure no results are handled carefully
-- e.g., what price of Wii would be & descriptor, but immediate indicator that it’s out of stock, so they don’t get misled

Tested search engines (77) & created an agility course for them
- test searches that should be findable - copied & pasted text directly from record of inventory record into search engine & it worked for specific model of Palm
- “implementation services” phrase searched on, ok
- intentionally mistyped things - “19 LCD Montinors”, ok
- this site did great on agility course
- but new search engine - so retested, but it tested worse - the misspelling & the implementation services tests & even the model of Palm all came back badly
- they had broken search by improving it
- we don’t have good metrics on search engine performance
- so putting together benchmark tests for search engines
- officemax.com did best in their agility course
- was able to handle “shipping tape”
- worst site performance = “your search did not produce results”, try “redoing your search with other search terms”
Build your own search obstacle course
- research the commonly used search terms
-- look for variants, such as synonyms, misspellings, or types
- go to target pages on the site & pick out trigger words
-- look at the heading and important descriptive phrases

Search problems to look for
- is search returning too many results without categorization or facets
- are the top links not match relevant
- are there duplicate links? (ppl will stop if they see duplicate terms)
- do users need to click to determine the relevancy of the result
- are categories weighted equally?
-- even though there’s an obvious first choice?

Correctable Input Errors vs. Search Indexing Errors
- 43% = search indexing
- 57% = correctable input (user input)
- spelling errors
- typos
- plurals
- parsing errors (tshirt (no hyphen), 19” LCD monitors (extra quote))
- multiple words: winter slippers, maternaty clothes
YOU MUST REGULARLY LOOK THROUGH YOUR SEARCH LOGS
(the reality of the situation = we can find the problems, but we librarians can rarely resolve them because we aren’t programmers & our vendors are not responsive)
Jared Spool talks about the Endeca search engine at Eddie Bauer site. Calls someone high up at Endeca & he fixes it while Jared is on hold. A missing ; was the difference between relevant and irrelevant search results.
Each technology that was at top of list, it was also at the bottom of the list...
it was the installation and implementation of the technology!!!!!!
Google search appliance sux on the intranet, because no 1 links back to the travel expense report, so doesn’t rank highly
- site design has more effect on the user’s success than user skill
- users always scan the page for trigger words before they search
- the site’s design forces the user to search
- users search from the page where they lose the scent
- not all content searches well (most doesn’t)
- users find a search box by its visual presentation
- focus on match relevant resutls
- implementation trumps vendor choice

Breadcrumbs
“they suck”
3 types of breadcrumbs =
1. path breadcrumbs - user actually clicked to get where they’re going
2. location breadcrumbs - best path / actual hierarchy in site, best way to get there
3. facet breadcrumbs - can click on any of them and get any combo
most users think breadcrumbs = path breadcrumbs - so confusing,
but mostly users don’t pay attention to breadcrumbs
because if they got to target content, they won’t look at it.
it’s a last ditch effort like the back button, without requiring them to hit back button
it’s an attempt to treat the symptom, rather than the problem
they can never use breadcrumbs to get unlost
they don’t care about the structure of your site
the problem = when people are spending a lot of time on breadcrumbs = a waste of resources

winnowing v. selecting
what you definitely don’t want v. picking what you do want

Supporting Winnowing
- winnowing supports reducing choices in galleries
- we’re seeing new interaction techniques to support winnowing - eliminating lousy candidates

Random notes in answer to audience questions:
users tend to move their mouse only AFTER they’ve decided that they want to go somewhere else (this is the problem with drop-down menus, they require users to move their mouse to decide where to go)
what about the giant footer - most people never use it - is just used for SEO
big pictures of the administrator are terrible on government sites (no good for the user)
“subject areas” is a too-generic term (on bureau of labor statistics)
“hero box” that huge slideshow you see on the home page - not usually helpful to users

Countdown to DrupalCon Chicago...

2011-03-04T00:03:00.003-05:00

I've got just a few days until DrupalCon Chicago, but there are a couple of things I've been wanting to post about, but haven't taken the time for lately.

1. is a huge congratulations to Westport Public Library for successfully migrating their website to the Drupal web content management system! They went live toward the end of January, I believe (apologies, can you tell I'm a bit behind? ;) ) The site looks great & has lots of exciting features - highlights of events and topics of interest at their library in the form of a slideshow at the top of their homepage, for example.
Perhaps more importantly, it's extensible for any future feature additions, iterative improvements, and redesigns (that's the power of a system like Drupal). The work done for Westport has also added back into the Drupal community in the form of a LibraryThing for Libraries Drupal module. That's how the "recommended reads" are brought into their site (see their home page).
2. we're experiencing a lot of success with our in-house implementation of Acquia's Drupal Commons distribution. A member of our IT staff put it up on a Windows server he had handy, so we're using it internally. We've seen it gain a lot of traction since he put it live last week - there are 23 members of the Commons now (for us, this is a lot of staff participation). The smartest thing we did with the Commons was highlight the "most active user" section of the site, where users' "points" (they get points for participating in the community - by discussing, "shouting" (and internal twitter of sorts), by posting to blogs, wiki pages, adding events, or otherwise interacting. This has spawned a slightly competitive (yet fun!) aspect to the community. Everyone wants to be the one with the most points. (I'm usually in the top five, but not always, lately). It's a great Drupal package, ridiculously easy to get going, especially if it's for a fairly casual, internal-type communications site. You can try out its features by joining the Acquia Commons, so you can see it for yourself. Or just download the stack & run it on your local computer or server. It's amazing!
I found & added in the Flickr Rippr module for the Commons (one of the joys of Drupal is that you can just add on modules however you want), in answer to a challenge made at this AM's digital collections meeting. Sure enough, it works beautifully in harvesting the items on our Flickr stream, their descriptions, tags, (it can also do the comments, but I didn't choose to import those in), and so on. I've set ours to cache the jpegs locally, so they're actually on our Drupal server. There are lots of other modules that deal with displaying Flickr photos/sets/streams in a Drupal site (& many ways to do that in other types of sites), but I chose this module because it actually created nodes for me from our stream. That meant that all of the great metadata our digitization guru put up into our Flickr stream was brought into the Drupal site & then automatically indexed by the Drupal site search.
Very cool!

Recommendations for your library's web presence: open-source web content management

2011-01-23T09:22:00.005-05:00

Drupal is a powerful, open-source web content management system. As many of you know, I've been working (for a very long time) on learning it well enough to do a single-handed migration of my library's large (3,200 page+) static html website to Drupal.

So I often get questions for others in the Connecticut library community about what to do with their own websites. I can definitely say that there is no library website that should remain on the old static html webpage built in Dreamweaver/Microsoft Expression Web/Other HTML editor. In other words, you definitely need a web content management system to run a website in the 21st-century. There are a lot of deep reasons for that. Probably the easiest one for me to explain is that it allows many people to easily work together on / contribute to the website. It also makes it easier for you to output the information you're providing on your website to your users in a way that they want to use it (for example, on their mobile phones vs. on a computer screen).

There's a whole array of options for web content management systems. The commercial, heavy-duty (often dubbed "enterprise-level") web CMS', can be extraordinarily expensive. I won't even bother talking about them for libraries.

There's also an array of options for open-source web CMS'. Many of them don't require you to commit to any licensing fees - in other words, using them doesn't cost you anything for the software. What you end up paying for, in comparison, is for human resources - the people to take the time to put into making the open-source system work. You may use your in-house webmaster/systems librarian or, more likely, you'll seek out a consultant with expertise in setting up one of these solutions for your library.

Often the documentation on open-source projects is less than ideal. On the other hand, at least you can Google for answers to your open-source problems (contrast this to seeking Google-ing for solutions to errors in proprietary commercial products like many Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, or SUN-based products - these companies tend to keep their troubleshooting tips behind a login/password-customer-only system so that the competition can't learn about their weaknesses). Someone somewhere's blogged about the issues they've faced with open-source products. It's part of the open source spirit to contribute your work back into the community. Publishing online about the problems you faced & how you overcame them is an easy way to do this.

So what are your options & what are their relative advantages & disadvantages? I'll go over only the ones that I have more than a passing familiarity with:

Wordpress - though it was initially conceived of as a blogging solution, it can now easily be used as a regular website content management system.
Drupal

Others would include Joomla, Silverstripe, and there are others that I may have only heard of in passing - just google open source web content management and you should find a listing of the latest.

Wordpress can be used in its fully hosted/3rd-party managed form at www.wordpress.com. It's free to set up an account, but you can also use (for a really small added annual fee - used to be $25/year) an account add-on that allows you to point your library's domain name to that site. You can also use a web hosting provider's hosted Wordpress installation (in many cases, you'll have to keep the Wordpress software updated yourself, but some web hosts even handle this for you) or a Wordpress installation that you run on your own server. You can download the Wordpress software & run it for free on your own web server (you'll also need to run PHP & MySQL on that server - get the download & how-tos from www.wordpress.org). Though it's slightly easier to run Wordpress (& other open-source web software) on an Apache web server than an IIS server, you can run it on either. Apache is easier to deal with and can run on a server that has Mac, Windows, or Linux operating systems.

Drupal can be used in several ways. It used to be that there wasn't really a wordpress.com-type option for Drupal, but recently, sites like Drupal Gardens sprang up to make it easy for anyone to quickly get up and running with a fresh site on Drupal (yes, migrating existing sites is always WAY harder than starting with a blank slate, but don't forget to do some information architecture/sketching/planning before you begin - identify your site's goals, what content you'll have & figure out how users will move through that content before just building willy-nilly if you want to ensure a decent website). Besides that, you can use a web hosting provider to run your Drupal site (ideally find one that other Drupal folks have recommended - because Drupal has needs that some web hosting providers don't serve well without a serious investment - e.g., getting at least a virtual private server, which can be very expensive). Or run Drupal on your own web server. It, too, requires PHP & MySQL and runs best on the Apache web server (though it can, with work, be made to function on IIS). Drupal tends to prefer a Linux (or Mac-based) operating system though - again, depending on how much of its functionality you want to leverage and how much work you want to do - you can make it work on the Windows operating system.

Side-by-side comparison of installed (not hosted) versions of these web content management systems: Wordpress offers more user-friendly functionality out of the box. Drupal 7 just went live and improves the out-of-the-box Drupal experience (compared to Drupal 6, which has been the standard for several years), but still lacks both the immediate elegance and user-friendliness (e.g., for editing content with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor) of a Wordpress install. But the moment you want to start integrating web resources at any deeper level, the advantage goes to Drupal. Wordpress goes from 60 to 0 at this point. You have to get deeply into PHP if there isn't already a plugin created for the system integration you're seeking in Wordpress (admittedly, though, there are lots of great Wordpress plugins now - you can only use those plugins with your own Wordpress install, not with the hosted Wordpress.com version of your site/blog). Additionally, Drupal can be implemented in some really flexible ways, accommodating lots of different needs - more so than Wordpress. But you really need a web professional for this type of Drupal usage. Custom themes in Drupal require someone who's comfortable with Drupal at what I would call a pretty deep level. The flip side of this challenge is that Drupal will "professionalize" your library systems/web people in that it can take them deeper and deeper into the core technologies driving the web today. You could "get by" without a web pro for Wordpress though, again, if you want to deeply customize the template that alters the way your information and navigation is provided, you'll need to get into the PHP (which, of course, you can't do on Wordpress.com). PHP itself is not a ridiculous challenge for a library systems person to take on - however if you're intimidated by html code, you'll find PHP almost impossible (at first). I should also reiterate that if you just need a quickly-put together, highly templated site (like a "website tonight" type thing), you can use either Wordpress.com or Drupal Gardens.

A final option for dealing with your libraries' web presence: you could go the "small pieces, loosely joined" route & cobble together a web presence using some combination of your:

blog (for example, at Blogger.com or Wordpress.com)
Facebook page
Catalog
Other web2.0 tools - like Slideshare for presentations/tutorials, Scribd for documents, Flickr or Picasa for photos & so on
You will need to point a domain name to a specific web-based page that will pull everything together - most likely that would be your blog page, but it could also be a Google Pages page or something else

If you go the route listed above, you will have to think about these downsides:

3rd-party free Web2.0 tools / social sites like Facebook, Slideshare, Flickr, Scribd may compromise your commitment to privacy for your patrons. They can also change their terms at any time and you may or may not learn about the changes enough ahead of time to migrate your content elsewhere (think about Yahoo's decision to rid itself of del.icio.us after years of its seemingly stable existence). Remember, when you rely on these types of tools exclusively instead of running your own site, your content is not 100% under your control, nor are the interactions people have with your site. This may or may not work out for your organization, but recognize that it's the reality. I usually recommend that organizations use Web2.0 tools to redirect users back into web-based resources that they actually control - like their own website/blog.
Brand consistency. It may be sacrificed by use of many disparate tools.
Ease of management. Having to log into many different sites to do different things with your web presence can become a burden. Make sure that you have at least a couple of people who work for your library who know what all of those sites (& their logins) are.
Advertising. Another issue that can come up when you're using another organization's technology is that they may underwrite your "free" access to their service by offering up ads alongside your content. In many cases, you won't have a choice about this.

So there we are. There are other options and a lot more depth that I can get into, this is the basic information I give folks who ask for my recommendation on what to do with their library websites...

Why don't libraries...?

2010-11-05T08:38:00.003-04:00

It's simple, I could expound on these for hours, but here's the thing. Why don't libraries?

allow patrons who are searching for a great new book (e.g., they heard an interview with the author on the news) to see if it's already on order at their public library
allow patrons to buy the book for 1st themselves, then to contribute into their local public library's collection when there's a hot new title (set it up through Amazon, for example, & then, in fact, also have Amazon give a percentage of the sales profit to the library)? People buy new books when their libraries don't have them & they just want the book instantaneously, but then when they're done, what do they do with them? This solves all of those issues, gives the library a better collection, & gives them some $, and makes the patron feel good about themselves. In fact, patrons participating in that program should be featured (if they desire) as special-level VIP/contributing member type patrons - perhaps publicly acknowledged on the website (it's like being an NPR supporter)
just do a mailing service to get materials to and from patrons - initiated online, a la Netflix
offer a couple of types of membership (1 the traditional way of being a patron, with fines, etc., 2 a premium membership that allows them a netflix-style arrangement wherein they don't incur fines & guilt/shame, but don't get a new item until the old item has been returned)
become community exchange centers for bookswaps (& exchange of other materials, as well), setting up an online system like a BookMooch (maybe ask LibraryThing's help or hire professional web developers to put a system together - it wouldn't be all that hard)
fix the ebook problem. Work with ebook content providers to setup online buying & exchanging cooperative accounts. Work out the licensing issues. Everyone in OCLC & ALA should stop working on ANYTHING else, DROP EVERYTHING, & get this underway NOWWWWWWW!!!!!!! IT SHOULDN'T TAKE MORE THAN A YEAR IF WE ALL APPLY PRESSURE TO THE INDUSTRY TO MAKE IT HAPPEN. WE DO NEED MORE BOOTS ON THE GROUND THOUGH. THIS IS A WAR FOR THE SURVIVAL OF LIBRARIES!!! I'M NOT KIDDING.

There are a million ways we could move forward into the 21st-century. But we'd all have to acknowledge the crisis we're in & address it. ASAP.

I mean, I'm not worried, I'll always keep digitally up-to-date enough that my skills will find a home/job/consultancy elsewhere. I have no doubt. But I'd like libraries to survive. This isn't about my job, per se, this is about the value of a community space for education, entertainment, connection & bridging the increasing digital & social divide in our great nation - in fact, in preserving democracy. A democracy requires its participants to be educated & it should be a basic right in America that everyone have access (throughout their lives) to educational materials, such as books, ebooks, databases, articles, journals, magazines, online versions of all of those things, videos, audio books, and so on. The library currently serves that function. Why? Because, overall, taking care of all levels of the community is not a big moneymaker, so the free market system will not rise to the occasion. They'll only take on the aspects of that problem when & where they can find a line of profit.

Centralization vs. innovation?

2010-10-27T10:24:00.004-04:00

I've worked for:

a large library automation consortium
a county library IT department
a state library

Recently, I've been working with committees for:

a library automation consortium
a statewide portal for state agencies/egovernment

Something that's ALWAYS bothered me, that I mull a lot, is the power of centralized vs. decentralized when building systems. When I worked for a library automation consortium, I was convinced that increasing the amount of centralization would enhance services. When I began working for a county system that ran its own automation platform, I began to notice how much more quickly we could react to the changes in technology than could a large consortium.

As Web2.0 became the trend, I noticed how some of the smallest, least assuming libraries managed to extend services or create more sophisticated web experiences than the big libraries. I wondered if the innovation happened closest to the ground, where the people building the systems were directly in touch with the experiences of the end users, good or bad.

I know that the architecture of the web is an enshrinement of the principle that decentralization ensures progress, innovation, and sustainability. Should a search engine create a better algorithm, the other search engines will try to improve on it. Should a node go out, that's fine, the net routes around it. There is no single point of failure. With Web2.0 the number of communication channels have increased. News often travels most quickly online via social networking sites - Twitter & Facebook, for example. So this argues for the power of a seemingly organic method of growing systems.

Governments build things in a more official, hierarchical, and centralized way. As a result, innovation is often stifled.

On the other hand, without centralization, we are constantly reinventing the wheel and duplicating efforts, are we not? Aren't there economies of scale in having everyone pool their money and bargain with the big vendors for the best possible setup that would cover all of the members of a project (whether we're talking about groups of governmental agencies or library consortia)? Wouldn't it be great if there were standards that users of multiple libraries or governmental agencies could count on when dealing with those entities?

An additional foil to a more tightly regulated, centralized system being the answer for library or governmental systems is the concept of monopolies of power. If the system is fully centralized, the power lies all in one place. There are no competitors. There is no ability to seek alternatives to the Dept. of Revenue Services, for example. In time, the relationships between the agency or library system and the customer grow strained. The customer has no options, no way out if the agency or library system isn't giving them satisfaction. It creates a very standardized experience, but not a user-centered experience.

But maybe that's part of the issue. If we could just center on the users' needs, maybe we would know how to build systems and services more effectively. The greatest successes happen where the maker's vision intersects with the users' needs & desires. That's where both libraries and governmental agencies want to go.

I'm open to your responses to this question of centralization vs. decentralization of systems and services. I've been wanting to post it for a long time and every time I envisioned writing about the issue, I was much more eloquent than this. But it's time to stop worrying about that and just get the discussion going.

Collaborative Content Teams

2010-10-18T16:50:00.004-04:00

So we've done quite a few things to prepare for our content migration (from a static html site to a Drupal-based site).

I've had decent luck with a test run of the Import HTML Drupal module (though I could only test it on one of my laptop-based stacks because it has some PHP prerequisites that precluded running it elsewhere (on hosted sites), such as the HTML Tidy PHP library & XML/XSL support). I also had to first detach our dynamic web templates & get rid of the header & footer include file statements to ensure that I wasn't getting extra junk...

We've defined a high-level taxonomy that were turned into content teams. The taxonomy was gleaned from the hard work of our taxonomy team (with the much-appreciated help of volunteer card sorters who took the top 100 pages of our current site & sorted them into categories they felt were appropriate, then gave those categories labels. BTW, though I didn't run stats as to how much difference there was, the card sort exercises did clearly demonstrate how much deeper (than non-librarian card sorters) the librarians wanted to go into categorization. Not a big surprise, I suppose, but I think it helps us to see how our navigation schemes have gotten so convoluted.)

The content teams are now assigned with telling me which pages in their areas can just be imported in (vs. those that have to be rewritten or rethought).

I tried to exclude from the teams' lists the content pages which would lend themselves to the creation of new content types (using the CCK module) & the use of the Views module to assemble that segmented content in what will appear to the end-user as a page, but I've probably missed a few.

Currently, I'm trying out the Links Package module in response to a discussion that came up in the first of our content team meetings. I feel like the all of the discussion and feedback from our content teams is already helping us to hone our migration strategy. The product will be better tomorrow because of our debates and decisions today. And that's a key benefit of collaborative work.

The Centralization Conundrum

2010-10-06T14:23:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking about this issue since I started working with library systems at a library automation consortium in 1998. The question is - which type of architecture works better and under which circumstances - one hierarchically dictated, centralized, large-scale system that provides for many different organizations - or a decentralized architecture, with each organization having its own individual system that meets local business needs.

The centralized system sounds like it would offer economies of scale. However, in many cases the centralized system is at such a scale that it costs exponentially more. The key advantage a centralized system really offers is the advantage that comes with centralized training and troubleshooting. One knowledgebase required, one set of experts who can solve all of its issues. So that's the real advantage.

The downside is that the centralized system wasn't necessarily built in a way that meets the needs of the individual organizations who've been sucked into it. The alternative - many little systems, one for each organization - allow that organization to customize things to meet their "on the ground" needs, to do real user-centered design. That's a level of flexibility and adaptability that centralized systems just don't offer. But it requires greater technological fluency on the part of each organization. The good news is that we're all more technologically fluent than we used to be and as new players enter the workforce, we grow still more fluent.

Then there is the issue of point of failure - a centralized system offers one. That's why the internet was built the way it was - decentralized. So it could continue functioning at some level no matter what.

I think about this issue of centralization v. decentralization a lot in terms of e-government. In an era when the technology for web-based services is so easy and cheap (or free), why can't agencies offer web-based services and information that are more usable and accessible? Take a look at this great article on e-government & you'll find a blueprint for how we could make government more technologically adept and user-friendly.

The old command and control model is hierarchical, centralized, and NOT web-speed. There needs to be a new model. It needs to focus on creating frameworks that allow the individual entities to do what they need to do to succeed with their customers. It needs to focus on ensuring collaboration, education, communication, interorganizational-compatibility, and usability for all stakeholders.

Putting Citizens First

2010-10-04T12:08:00.004-04:00

I’ve been watching the #gov20 Twitter stream since the Government2.0 summit last month (the few times I actually feel like I have a moment to look at Twitter, that is!) Through the stream, I learned about a great white paper called “Putting Citizens First: Transforming Online Government” (PDF) that was put together by the Federal Web Managers council.

What struck me about it most was that you could pretty much exchange the terms "government" and "agencies" with "library" and "libraries" and the paper would often be right on the mark.

A case in point:

… promise the American people that when they need [library] information and services online, they will be able to:

Easily find relevant, accurate, and up-to-date information;
Understand information the first time they read it;
Complete common tasks efficiently;
Get the same answer whether they use the web, phone, email, live chat, read a brochure, or visit in-person;
Provide feedback and ideas and hear what the government will do with them;
Access critical information if they have a disability or aren’t proficient in English.

Further:

Establish Web Communications as a core [library] function

One of the biggest problems we face in improving [library] websites is that many [libraries] still view their website as an IT project rather than as a core business function. Many [library] websites lack a dedicated budget. Only a minority of [libraries] have developed strong web policies and management controls. Some have … “legacy” websites with outdated or irrelevant content. With limited resources, many find it difficult to solicit regular customer input and take quick action to improve their sites. While there are many effective [library] websites, most web teams are struggling to manage ...

...[Libraries] should be required to fund their “virtual” [community] space as part of their critical infrastructure, in the same way they fund their “bricks and mortar” [community] space.

[Libraries] should be required to appoint an editor-in-chief for every website they maintain, as do the top commercial websites. This person should be given appropriate funding and authority to develop and enforce web policies and publishing standards, including ensuring that prime real estate on [library] websites is dedicated to helping people find the information they need.

[Library management] should develop standard job descriptions and core training requirements so [libraries] can hire and retain highly qualified experts in web content and new media—not just IT specialists.

And there are other points as salient for libraries as they are for other governmental agencies, such as these report sections/headings:

Help the public complete common [library] tasks efficiently
Clean up the clutter so people can find what they need online
Engage the public in a dialogue to improve our customer service
Ensure underserved populations can access critical information online

The whole report is worth reading (and it's pretty quick to do so, at just 4 pages), so I won't elaborate on those sections here. Overall, it left me feeling that we (governmental agencies and libraries) ALL have a lot of work to do.

sorry it's been so long...

2010-09-30T05:23:00.002-04:00

Wow, can you believe it's practically October? That's crazy - well, we still have a day left of September... OK, so what've I been doing... well, the stuff I can talk about (I know, I know. I'm a big advocate of transparency, but until the system changes, given the type of larger environment I operate in, I really can't say too much. sigh):

User eXperience Roundtable (the roundtables are efforts to bring libraries together to share information - coordinated by the Ct. Library Consortium) - we had a meeting down at lovely Darien Public Library, where we toured the amazing facilities and listened to Associate Director of User Experience, John Blyberg, explain their user-centered design (of both the physical and digital aspects of their library, which are intertwined)
DrupalCampCT - volunteered there & attended as presentations as possible anyway... plus, I attend most of the Central CT Drupal Meetups (many thanks to our organizer, who ensures that we have regular and very productive meetings every month)
DrupalCamp NYPL - attended both days of this great event, put on by the New York Public Library, who recently switched over to a gorgeous Drupal-based website. We're all so grateful that they shared their expertise and experiences. I hope that one day my organization can give back to the community, much as they have.

Probably the most powerful thing I've learned in the past 5 weeks is how amazing the Drupal community is for help, training, support, troubleshooting. There is a passion among Drupal users to help lift one another up. So they do this, sans reward (for free). But in repayment, you just have to know that you owe it to community to give back when, where, and how -ever you can. I can't wait until I can give back!

Not Just Roving Reference, Roving Circulation?!

2010-08-04T10:50:00.002-04:00

I spent part of my morning at the wildly successful (so crowded, there was a line of people in front of the "Genius Bar" at 9:30 in the AM ... and they don't officially open until 10!) Apple store in the Westfarms Mall (West Hartford, CT).

Last time I'd been there, there was a traditional checkout counter toward the front of the store and the Genius bar in back. Now, there was nothing in front but more desktop/display space with more Apple products that could be tried out by the passing customers. If you wanted to line up (as apparently, we did, given how instinctively we created a queue at the back of the store), you had to head to the Genius bar. Now, mind you, the store wasn't open until 10. Before 10, however, a person came out to deal with the line, triaging & figuring out where/when/whom people needed to work with to get done what they wanted to get done (there are also preset appointments with "Apple geniuses" that the store recommends you set up online ahead of time). Suddenly, the line wasn't a problem. We all felt like we were being helped.

The person who helped me - the "Business Specialist" - had a little device on him that looked like an iPhone. Only it wasn't. It was a bit thicker than an iPhone. AND... he was able to do my whole transaction with that device - he rang me up, swiped my credit card on one side of the machine, even created a discount to deal with my tax exempt situation, and emailed the receipt to me. The only part that required him to leave my side was the printing of a physical receipt, which he quickly returned with. And voila, I was done, adapter cable purchased.

SOoooo - I was asking him how people liked the lack of the checkout desk & he said that even the users were thrilled with it. There was no longer a bottleneck in that area, he said.

I'd noticed, however, that the new setup really required a lot of clearly identified Apple store employees (they all wear blue shirts & a lanyard & I think an id) who were PROACTIVE in helping the customers, so no one felt too lost without the central checkout stand. There was also a high number of employees out there to handle the crowd.

But as we talked, he mentioned that he would add me to the list of people who might be interested in learning when this mobile cash register device was made available to everyone. Apparently, it's only available to Apple stores, but Apple is planning on production of these things. It's a FAN-TASTIC idea!

So imagine what this means for libraries. The next big thing won't just be roving reference, but roving circulation! We'd better limber up & get used to being proactive in our customer service skills, introducing ourselves and offering to help.

My Audio Ebook Mis-Adventures: A Lesson in UX Fail!

2010-07-09T16:12:00.003-04:00

[Warning: this is a total rant. There's a lot of "WTF" and other inappropriate language...]
Basically, I’m going to walk you through a process that might leave you saying - geez, can’t believe she didn’t know how to do that. But the moment you think that, I want you to stop. Because I’ve been involved with computers since I was in middle school. I’ve been a systems librarian effectively since 1998. Before that, I was the informal dorm expert on everyone’s computer setup. They sought me out because I could figure it out. It’s possible that I’ve lost iq points over the years, or just lost patience. But - put it this way - I can GUARANTEE that if I’M HAVING THIS PROBLEM, OTHERS ARE TOO!

But they’re voting with their feet. You aren’t hearing from them because they - like my brother-in-law (who is, yes, only interested in audio books & videos & having gone through his local public library’s collection & not being allowed to get a broader set of options through ILL, refuses to go back to the library - feeling that there’s nothing there for him). That’s right. He literally feels that his public library (which is a pretty progressive and moderately well-funded public library) HAS NOTHING FOR HIM. THE LIBRARY IS FOR SOMEONE ELSE. Is HE going to stand up and fight to pay more taxes to support his library? I think not.

But Webhead, you say, my statistics show that people ARE USING OVERDRIVE!!!!!! LOTS OF PEOPLE!!!! OK, NO. The answer is - according to Overdrive - I now have 5 (with a limit of 5 possible) titles out. I can’t listen to 4 of the 5 and the 5th I can listen to on the Mac Mini, but NOT ON MY IPHONE WHICH WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE PROJECT. YOUR STATISTICS LIE! PEOPLE TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT FRUSTRATION. (As an aside, the deal is this - people have enough frustration, fears, anxieties, and issues in their lives that they HAVE to deal with, that’s why they whine about the little things that don't work when they should.)

Ok, so here’s how the whole thing went down. I finally decided to return to my local library. I had garden and pool work I wanted to do this afternoon & an audio book sounded like it would fit the bill - I’d get to learn something & get the mundane tasks completed, simultaneously. Perfect. I went to the audio books section. It was lean. Not much in the way of new titles. I’d pretty much listened to the tapes and CDs that were there or else they weren’t of interest at all. But there was a big sign telling me about their Overdrive audio ebook section. Go online, it told me.

Now, I’d tried doing this exact thing before a trip in May. I’d banged my head against the Overdrive audio ebook wall for over an hour that go ‘round. Then I decided, screw it, I had to go to bed, and that was that.

But I figured - today I’m under less pressure, not packing to go away or anything, and I have this new higher-speed cable broadband. I also have my new wireless-N router to test out. So I went online to my local public library website. I saw the graphical link to Overdrive in the right-hand column, so I clicked on it. And voila! I’m at the local library’s automation network’s “Downloadable eMedia Catalog”. The welcome screen promises:

“Download digital media 24/7 to your PC, Mac or portable device. Now your library never closes!”

Wow! That sounds awesome, I think. I immediately want to search & see if the titles I want are available (& in the format that works for my iPhone). I can do a really basic search, but there's no easy way to specify that one of my search parameters is that I want the title to be an audio book & to be in iPhone-compatible foramt. That's a huge fail. (Yes, you can do this in Advanced Search if you (a) can find it; (b) understand the difference between these 3 options: "Adobe EPUB ebook"; "Overdrive MP3 AudioBook"; "Overdrive WMA Audiobook". Don't make the person search by these "formats", instead have them narrow their search by the intended use - something more like: "Read the ebook (Adobe EPUB)"; "Listen to the ebook on any device (iPod, Mac, other)"; "Listen to the ebook on a PC/Windows device")

Instead, the content that catches my eye are the streams of book jackets that show me what categories I can browse. There are 6:

1. Recent Additions: eBooks
2. Recent Additions: Audiobooks
3. iPod®-compatible Audiobooks!
4. Top 100 Titles
5. Just Returned
6. Language Instruction

Now, what’s the difference between #2 & #3? If you aren’t a librarian who’d heard about the big audio ebook nightmares that have been going on (since at least 2004, as I recall!) you would just assume that #2 IS playable on an iPod. And honestly, if the reason you’d ended up at this Overdrive site was because you got referred to it from the library’s physical audio books section, you might even be confused by #1 - you might assume that they’re ALL audio books.
But whatever. That’s being a bit picky about the ux.

So I focused in on “Hot, Flat & Crowded” - I really wanted to hear that one. But I forgot it wasn’t under stream #3, which is what I really wanted, because what I really wanted was something for my iPhone. I clicked on the title & got into an item record. Under the book jacket & description, there are little icons that were supposed to show me whether or not the title is something I can use. I see that this one has the following icons not greyed out: PC, WMA, & iPod. So I want the iPod one, I think. I click on the iPod icon. It does nothing. I look for a download link. There is none. I see two links up near the title: “Add to My List" and "Add to Wish List". (BTW, on some titles, there's only "Place a hold" and "Add to Wish List", so I'm GUESSING that you can tell if the title has an available copy w/o going all the way into the item record & looking at the #s of available copies, by seeing if it has an "Add to My List" option. If it does, it means a copy's available right now. Otherwise, you can place a hold or you're out of luck.)

I’m only scanning for a download link, so I don’t notice that it also says - across from these links - “OverDrive WMA Audiobook”. It’s a meaningless distinction anyway, since I don’t know what “OverDrive WMA Audiobook” really means (though what it’s warning me of is that it’s only usable in an OverDrive console and that it’s in Windows Media format). So don’t expect to just download it and play it (of course not!) More problematically, our home computer is a Mac. I got a Mac so I could reduce the amount of personal tech support I do and still get my husband online as easily & quickly as possible. If I were to buy a machine for my mom, I’d do the same thing - I’d stick with Mac. And you’d think that - if this is iPod-friendly - it would be Apple-friendly. But it’s not.

I finally decide that - even though it practically hurts me to do it, since it SEEMS wrong - I hit “Add to My List”. (BTW, WTF is supposed to be the difference between “Add to My List” and “Add to Wish List”? just sayin’...) Ok, now what?

It shows a “My List” screen now with the title & lets me choose to either “Continue Browsing” or “Proceed to Checkout”. Now those are phrases that make good sense to me. I hit “proceed to checkout”.

Oh, son-uva-gun. I can’t tell you with 100% certainty what happens next. You know why? I’ve tried so many goddarned times that I’ve exceeded my 5 title limit. Even though I can’t actually get any of them on my iPhone. And no, apparently, there’s no way for me to return them without downloading them, even though I can’t use them. Ugghhh....

And yes, I downloaded, the damn iPhone app for Overdrive & tried downloading directly through my iPhone, which is a PAINFUL, AWFUL, TERRIBLE process that moves you into the Safari browser, then requires you to go through session authentication by choosing - 1st your home library - then entering your 14-digit library barcode # (which of course is not remembered by your iPhone browser... WTF does the Overdrive app not store this account info - iTunes does & I would've expected that to be the key piece of an iPhone app for Overdrive. And there's a whole world of other fails on the Overdrive iPhone app. It doesn't let you search your library's collection of Overdrive books - or any collection of Overdrive books for that matter - unless they're already downloaded onto your phone.)

Once authenticated (yes, you're totally in the Safari browser on your iPhone now), you can check your account & see what titles you've already "checked out" then hit a button that says "download". But even though I'd only "checked out" titles that were supposedly iPod-friendly, when I hit the "download" button, after the screen switched to the Overdrive app again where it was supposedly downloading the file to, an error 600: format (that it's a WMA file... no kidding!) popped up on the screen. I called the library automation network's help desk and they said that while you couldn't play the WMA's, even through the OD app, on a Mac, supposedly the WMA s that appear in the list of iPod-friendly titles can be played on the OD app for the iPhone. WTF?! Makes absolutely NO sense.

I tried downloading a title onto my Mac & then moving it over to my iPhone, but I could see no way to do that, but that wouldn't have eliminated the WMA format issue, anyway. I then tried just to get an audio ebook title to work on my Mac. The only combo that seemed to work was to go through the list of audio ebook titles, see if the icon for Mac was lit up (& it seemed like there were maybe just a few titles that fit that bill, but I couldn't really tell & was tired of paging through the list - there wasn't a search on that format option that I was able to find), then not only download that, but do so after having 1st downloaded an application from Overdrive for the Mac to play the MP3 title that was Mac-friendly.

And, BTW, despite the promises of the "iPod-friendly" titles that were in WMA, tthe only title I was ever ultimately able to get onto my iPhone was the one that I was able to get on the Mac mini - the Mp3 file. I haven't tried playing it yet. The whole afternoon was lost.

So much fail. Thanks a lot, local library. Thanks a lot, Overdrive. And no, I won’t vote with my feet. I’m a friggin’ librarian. I love my local library. I know that their heart is in the right place. I know it’s not them. I know it’s not the library automation network they get this through. I know that every organization I mentioned here is trying to get us into the 21st-century and keep our libraries relevant (I'm including Overdrive in this).

But honest to god, colleagues, if we aren’t going to offer a REAL, GOOD, USER-TESTED, USER-FRIENDLY SERVICE, let’s not offer the service at all. Because it’s worse to offer something that doesn’t work than to say - no, we’re not capable of doing this, so we only offer the old school services that we do know how to offer.

BETTER STILL, let's just work on making it better. Because it IS a service we need to offer. It's just that we need to do so effectively.

Roadmap to Digitization notes from ALA

2010-06-29T13:17:00.003-04:00

On Saturday afternoon, I attended this session which - while billed as "a roadmap for digitization for smaller institutions" still taught me a lot. The speaker was Jacob Nadal, the Preservation Officer at the UCLA library.

There was a lot of background information on file formats & metadata. The parts that seemed most pertinent to our current questions/concerns about digital collections at the State Library included the following recommendations/best practices (though there is no specific order here):

1. Digitization efforts require considerable technical expertise from an IT perspective, so it should be managed by an IT professional
2. Avoid organizing your files by the online presentation or by projects (because digital objects will be reused in ways you cannot yet anticipate)
3. Avoid naming with filenames - use a numeric pattern/accession # (or if it's materials from archives, if there is a collection #/ serial #, use that and you can tack onto the end _Master.tif). If you NAME files, you are adding descriptive metadata into the naming scheme for the file, which is a bad idea (see again the note on digital objects being reused in ways you cannot yet anticipate).
4. Use XML for metadata (because it is a stable format for digital preservation) - can be any schema - but this is what added the essential piece for digital library functionality; you should include metadata specialists from the outset of a digitization project
5. VRA is a good XML schema for digital objects with visual characteristics.
6. Good enough is better than highly detailed/perfectionistic approach to object and its metadata
7. There are certification requirements that "trusted" digital repositories should meet (see OAIS - RLG prepared the certification criteria) & that repositories should meet even if they are not officially certified as "trusted". OCLC's digital archives, and a number of other digital repositories are certified)
8. For digital preservation, many grassroot groups form their own private, local LOCKSS networks - the software is free
9. Digital asset management is probably overkill (& added complexity) for most libraries. It would include managing metadata & materials, but it adds considerably more functionality than that. Digital asset management systems are used by advertising companies, for example, who have to monetize digital assets & control them more strictly for IP & versioning purposes. (I specifically asked about this due to our interest in this type of system and that he hadn't mentioned it in the presentation).
10. Public access to digitized materials isn't the same as digital preservation. He uses Wordpress for the site he runs to offer people public access to digital collections. (Greenstone & Omeka were also mentioned for presentation layer, but he didn't go deeply into this area).
11. For color calibration, you should buy a spectrometer - it's just a couple hundred $ and lasts several years. Trying to get color calibration by eye is a huge mistake. In fact, a study showed that color gets worse the more an "expert" in imaging looks at it - so use the device, it's impartial. Calibrate at least 1 x / week.

His presentation is now up on his site at http://www.jacobnadal.com/84.
A key resource he pointed people to was PREMIS - http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/ - (PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies).

Libraries Wanted: Dead or Alive? Notes from ALA

2010-06-29T11:28:00.002-04:00

In an ALA session Sunday called “Libraries: Wanted Dead or Alive?”, the director of the world’s most modern library – Eppo van Nispen tot Sevenaer of the DOK Library Concept Center in Delft, Netherlands - gave librarians the inspiration and motivation to make changes in order to ensure the survival of the library through the 21st-century and beyond.

Eppo pointed out in a variety of ways, including “man on the street” videos he’d recorded since arriving in the DC area, that libraries are increasingly irrelevant to many people’s lives and that it is our job to preserve the role of the library in communities.

First Eppo asked a number of people (from different age groups and ethnic backgrounds) whom he encountered- whether or not they wanted to become a librarian. No one said “yes”. Instead, we watched them as they said things like:

“I love books, but I don’t like the library.”

“How do I put this… I don’t mean to be harsh, but being a librarian today is like being a caveman.”

He noted that librarians have traditionally been more interested in collections of books than in connections to people. He pointed out the absurdity of a no food or drink around the books in the library rule when the same libraries send the books home with people for 2-3 weeks at a time. Who’s to say there’s no food and drink around them when they’re loaned out – do librarians show up at the patrons’ homes to audit their use? But for all that librarians have focused their efforts on the collection of books and protecting those collections, books don’t protest when libraries close. Only library users can advocate for the library. It’s the strength of the connection between the library and its user community that prevents a loss of funding.

Eppo also pointed out some of the uncomfortable realities of our field and the implications of those realities. For example, librarians generally haven’t been involved in pop culture or creating technological innovation. Without having seen what 90% of our users have seen, he points out in his references to Avatar (which, for the record, I have not seen either… the stereotype fit), how can we participate in conversations with them? How can we understand the forces shaping them (e.g., expectations of graphical stimulation)? He also said that future learners will be visual and tactile, but much less text-based. Still, most librarians learn by reading. They don’t understand/don’t respect the visual and tactile world as well as the population they are serving does.

What does that mean to us on the ground in library land? Well, our websites and catalogs don’t even meet users’ core expectations – they don't establish visual credibility.

Another theme Eppo touched on was that of the rules that libraries traditionally have set for patrons & the seriousness with which librarians approach life. These two aspects of traditional library culture have created spaces where people feel unwelcome, constrained, and unhappy. But people don’t want to have that type of experience. They want to laugh, play, feel creative and empowered. So what are we, as librarians, doing to meet those needs?

Then he reminded us that we COULD make the changes that need to be made; that libraries are counting on us; that we will be challenged, that some of our efforts will fail or will fail at first. All we need, he told us, is more courage to do what must be done – to make deep changes in the culture of library that will allow us to connect with our library’s users. That connection is the only way libraries will continue to exist in the post-Google world.

Brains, Behavior & Design

2010-06-07T14:35:00.002-04:00

I just discovered the IIT Institute of Design's toolkit highlighting the key findings of behavioral economics as they apply to design work (see their website on Brains, Behavior & Design - very cool!) The "tools" include beautifully-designed posters, worksheets, and reference cards (downloadable / printable PDFs) describing common motivators (and demotivators) and how designers can leverage those patterns of behavior. As designers of our patrons' experience with the library, we also need to be aware of these concepts.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do…

2010-05-26T13:14:00.008-04:00

I’m so impressed by my colleagues in the Connecticut library community. I can’t say it enough. Beyond providing an inordinate number of “movers & shakers” (per capita), they demonstrated enough interest in the cutting edge (for libraries) topic of “user experience design” (uxd) that we had approximately 30 CT librarians in attendance at our new User Experience Roundtable.

We started with a meet-and-greet, then had 2 excellent speakers:
1. Michael Rawlins, President of the Connecticut Chapter of the Usability Professionals Association, Certified Usability Analyst, and professor at Manchester Community College
2. John Blyberg, Assistant Director for Innovation and User Experience at Darien Library. In December 2008, he formed the User Experience department to completely redefine how customer service and interaction is handled and delivered to library staff and users.

Michael Rawlins presented an introduction to “Why Usability Matters” from his perspective as a certified usability professional who’s worked at a number of Fortune 100 companies (major insurance firms have been among his employers) as a usability professional (and information architect) for more than twenty years. He’s the Director of Marketing and User Experience for the Open Solutions software firm in Glastonbury, Connecticut, which builds banking software solutions. He is also a certified usability professional who teaches the topic at Manchester Community College, where they are trying to build a certification program (hoping that this program starts around the time I find funding for it – I definitely want to sign up).

He also characterized himself as the typical “Baby Boomer” & identified how most people in this key demographic look at and feel about technology. He reminded us to think about the many different audiences we serve and to consider the features of such demographic groups as the Millennials, Gen Xers, Baby Boomers, and Traditionalists.

Michael gave us a definition of usability:
· Effectiveness – can users achieve their goals?
· Ease of learning – how fast do they learn the interface or system construct?
· Efficiency of use – how fast users complete tasks
· Memorability – short & long term memory leveraged
· Error prevention – is there “forgiveness”?
· User satisfaction – do users like the application?

Michael talked about "mental models" - how users expect things to work a certain way. When we break our user’s mental model, they respond negatively. He explained that usability professionals use scientific findings from the fields of social psychology and neuroscience to help designers build more effective interfaces.

In a time of ever-fewer resources, Michael pointed out that we need to be more strategic in our decision-making. He talked about the “value proposition” of doing user experience design / usability testing – that every dollar invested in Usability returns $10-$100.

Bigger than the financial rewards, however, are the benefits that derive from engaging in a better process – a human–centered process. The human-centered process – “people before systems… experience before systems” (cited from Nate Bolt of Bolt | Peters) – allows an organization to develop the deeper relationships with users that will ensure its longevity in a rapidly-changing world.

Additionally, Michael pointed out what many of us Library2.0 advocates have been trying to say, but perhaps because it was coming from a 3rd-party the argument seemed to have more resonance - that libraries need to reinvent themselves in order to survive.

I’m going to paraphrase here, because I didn’t write down an exact quote, but in talking about the disruptive forces that libraries are facing (& thus the impetus for a new emphasis on user experience):
1. Our competition is fierce & doing a better job than we are of providing the kind of user experiences that people go out of the way to have: (B&N – he had the following quote on one of his slides: )
From a baby boomer, about Barnes & Noble, he quoted: “It’s pretty easy to find what you want… The lighting is good – and it provides cozy areas to sit relax and read. The information desk is in the middle of the store – it’s the first thing you see when you come in…”
From a millennial, he quoted “I wish there was like a Netflix for books. Like you can just order whatever you want and then when you’re done you can just give it back and take out another one” (cited from Nate Bolt of Bolt | Peters)
He told us about speaking to science & technology magnet school (high school) students the previous day and asking the students about their impression of libraries. Their immediate reaction was the image of the “shushing” librarian…
So that tells you something. We haven’t rebuilt our libraries successfully enough – the experience hasn’t changed consistently enough across libraries that we can rebrand ourselves. You can put the p.r. out there all you want, if the users’ experience on the ground disproves that their library has changed and is now all about them, the p.r. won’t resonate.
The Darien Library’s of the world – the libraries with welcome desks, that build all of their services around what their community wants rather than around what librarians think they “should do” or how they think that a library patron should behave – are outliers at this point.
We need to get everyone else there – and to do so before libraries, like newspapers, are seen as relics of another era, no longer meaningful in the lives of most members of the community (no longer relevant = $0 funding).
All of these points about reinvention were bolstered by Michael’s admission that – despite being an intellectually curious, successful, community-oriented person who used to frequent libraries in both his youth & college years – he hasn’t been into his local public library in three years.
2. He also noted that mobile devices, like the iPhone and the iPad have become the library for many people like himself and that this trend will continue and accelerate.
I know that I’m going to forget really important pieces of what he had to say – more importantly, was how he explained it, so if you ever get a chance to attend one of his classes or presentations, I recommend that you do so.

He gave us 4 recommended actions to take away from the presentation:
1. Watch 5 people use your website
2. Watch 5 people navigate your library
3. Build something using a social networking tool
4. Think from the users’ point of view

He also gave us a list of books to look at:
1. Don Norman. The Design of Everyday Things
2. Jesse James Garrett. The Elements of User Experience
3. Subject to Change
4. Steve Krug. Don’t Make Me Think
5. Mental Models

Next came John Blyberg, the Assistant Director of Innovation and User Experience (love the title & what it says about about the Darien Library’s organizational focus). Because what Darien is doing in the realm of user experience is so broad, he took one slice to talk about – the digital slice – the development of the latest version of SOPAC 2 (take a look at an earlier presentation he did on SOPAC2).

I don’t want you to block everything that comes next out because I used that acronym. Forget SOPAC. Remember the mission – the open source software that John has developed aims to:
1. Integrate the users’ experience of the library’s website and the catalog. The catalog is the most important aspect of the online library experience, but it’s usually a whole different system which looks, feels, and functions differently than the website. Worse still, the catalog systems that our vendors supply are so completely inadequate for our communities’ needs that they create a “usability nightmare” for patrons and staff
2. Allow the users to be engaged with the catalog, the library, and each other through the integrated web presence
3. Support social networking – allow the community to form its own groups organically around the topics of interest to them.

SOPAC takes the catalog and puts it into the context of the Drupal content management system, allowing an additional layer of data to be created and invoked – the social layer – such as reader’s reviews, ratings, and tags for items in the catalog. Staff members themselves take advantage of SOPAC to assemble reading lists using specific tags, such as staff favorites or other tags that show which items have been discussed in book talks or books that meet a teacher’s reading list criteria. Community-built reader’s advisory grows using SOPAC. Some of the Darien Public Library’s patrons have even developed followings by other patrons who follow their recommendations religiously. SOPAC also uses data from the catalog to provide lists, such as “hot fiction” (heavily circulated items).

SOPAC - "Social OPAC" - is built on Drupal and is structured to allow it to integrate with any Integrated Library System (currently mostly III implementations, 1 consortial Sirsi implementation coming up - SAILS network in Massachusettts).

I’m not giving it adequate space or even a complete picture of what SOPAC does here. John’s work on SOPAC really deserves its own post/posts, but I have to wrap up and get on to working on my own library’s user experience issues.

To see SOPAC in action, search at the Darien Library’s website/catalog. You can even try books that are hard to search for in traditional catalog interfaces, such as Stephen King’s “It” and you’ll find that the search algorithm and tagging options work together to pull up the appropriate title. Amazing! (gee, it’s the way it should work, thinks the patron… but for those of us used to the vendor-supplied catalog interfaces, it seems like a miracle…)

The whole reason I'd wanted to get this User Experience Roundtable off the ground was that I was learning so much from the world of professional web development about how to build our site from a user-centered design perspective but none of the people I was speaking with from local libraries seemed to be hearing this information (nor did they have time to discover it on their own – webmastering is one tiny fraction of what they do). Plus, I know that our libraries – while wonderful treasures – often fail on the user experience front.

It’s a paradigm shift to move from building library services around what we– the expert librarians – think the users need (or what library school or years of library work have taught us to build) to opening up to the users and letting them tell us what they want us to build (e.g., how about community-driven collection development? What about that Netflix model for library circulation or an option to have either Netflix style circ or the traditional, fine-based circulation?)

I noticed that there were so many things in library-land that could be improved upon, but that we weren’t getting together to share information with one another on these larger questions of improving the users' experience. We can move faster and farther together, I thought. What if I could – face to face – share what I’m seeing in doing task-based user tests of our website, what I’m learning about card sorts, and so on – with other library people, so that they wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel? What if I could learn from them, what if I could get ideas about what we could/should do at my library to improve our users’ experience?

The great news is that my colleagues have also showed an interest in the User Experience roundtable as a venue to:
· Work on usability / user experience design for users of their library’s web presence (website redesign projects, for example…. Better still, deployment of SOPAC as part of such projects!)
· Talk about usability improvements for on-the-ground library users (e.g., why do we need to send them to more than 1 staff member to get the help that they need? What type of signage is both effective and welcoming?)
· Discuss of methods for information-sharing among staff and improving efficiencies (e.g., only 1 person has the study room schedule so the librarian who doesn’t have it has to send them over to that other person? In an era of Google docs, should this even be an issue –maybe not, but sometimes it takes throwing the problem out to a group for brainstorming… granted part 2 is that the UX rt member has to go back to their library & convince the others at their library to put a new process in place, but maybe sharing ideas on how to do that is also a good idea…)
· Sharing about initiatives that improved users’ experience with the library
· Sharing “fail stories” - initiatives/innovations that didn’t improve users’ experience

Next time, we’ll meet at Darien Library (probably late July? Join the CLC User Experience Roundtable forum to keep up with the latest discussions – we’ll also post on CONNtech listserv before the next event). John Blyberg graciously offered the roundtable the chance to come down & visit their facility, see many of the “on the ground” innovations they’re trying out to improve their library users’ experience, and have the next big discussion about user experience design in libraries.

A huge thanks to Shawn Fields, Branch Director of the Huntington Branch Library, who has volunteered to take on the role of co-chair of the roundtable & to Kirsten Kilbourne, of the Connecticut Library Consortium who worked out the roundtable logistics…

Finally, thank you to our speakers – Michael Rawlins and John Blyberg, to Manchester Community College staff members (especially Bruce Manning, Janet Alampi, Paula Cooke) and to all of the people who came & explained what user experiences they wanted to improve at their libraries.

Yup, sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is to connect people with one another …

the power of open source

2010-04-22T09:24:00.003-04:00

I'm pretty overwhelmed now that I've returned from my annual Computers In Libraries conference trip. I've got a lot to do & little time to do it in, like everyone. But, I wanted to get this out there - the thought I've had for so long about the power of open source (reiterated further when I listened to the DrupalCon SF keynote being livestreamed yesterday afternoon & heard from the President's new media guru, who was behind the use of Drupal as a CMS for whitehouse.gov and is SO into "open government" that the Whitehouse.gov team has contributed modules of their own back into the Drupal community).

Open source is not free. We all know that. But it shifts the economic benefit from one of vendor profits to one of staff development - the building of human capital. From that investment in the development of, say, in-house Drupal expertise, the returns you get are things like:

the ability to customize the system to your specific users' needs and your specific business' needs (instead of being bound to a set of system features that are implemented by a vendor on the basis of how profitable those features would be in the larger market)
improved competence among IT staff
higher morale among staff dealing with the systems they're implementing. People are intrinsically motivated by the ability to create and to have some control over their own destinies. That's an even more powerful factor in the happiness and productivity of employees than higher salaries.
a sense of social good - of contributing to a larger community - a sense of purpose

There are doubtless many more benefits the community can come up with re: open source - feel free to add in your thoughts or correct me if you think I'm off-base. But I truly, truly think that the shift of investment from giving more $ to 3rd-party vendors whose only motive is $ to spending that money on training and building staff is a positive thing for people, communities, and the economy in general.

So, to all of the businesses, nonprofits, and governmental organizations who are headed in the direction of open-source implementation - congratulations - I think your investment will be well-worth it. (I know Evergreen (open source ILS) is having its users' group right now and I'm sure a lot of wonderful new developments will be coming out of that!)

Cloud Computing & Digital Videos

2010-04-14T16:20:00.002-04:00

Cloud Computing
& Digital Video
#cloudvid
Jason A. Clark

A look ahead
- what's the cloud
- cloud as smart outsourcing
- reasons to move into the cloud
- gotocollegeMT.org/videos/

API
- rules for talking to remote server
- store
- retrieve
- upload

cloud defined = internet-based computing
- buzzword
- storage
- services
- intrastructure
- moving away from client/server model
- internet-based platform for computing

cloud options
- Amazon S3
- OCLC Digital Archive - web-scale management services (strictly storage) - safekeeping of master files - Worldcat is moving toward this
- Google App Engine - build apps using Google's infrastructure - using their Python, etc., for example
- Datastores of popular sites - Flickr, YouTube, blip.tv
- Google Docs
- Google Fusion Tables - can pckg huge amts of data into Excel-like packages & query

Problem:
- create scalable digital video platform in a week or so
- his dept = him, another librarian, 2 support workers

solution:
use online video services for ingest, datastore, metadat, file conversion, distribution, video player
TerraPod - http://www.terrapodcast.com
any MT K-12 students had to be able to submit to this (if they upload to blip.tv or youtube & then get data) - just need to add a tag to it - then gets queue info - outsourced metadata to K-12 users
use blip.tv player

cloud = infrastructure
- open & available storage
- open & available resources/services
- structured data

cloud = platform
- access to programming languages
- deployment tools
- application stacks
- blank slate for data

cloud = web scale
- network benefit
- enhanced distribution
- social architecture

why? advantages
- small shop
- many contributors, familiar ui
- optimized search index
- metadata entry and harvest
- file conversions
- social features and media players
- multiple file outputs (m4v, flv, mpeg)
multiple distribution formats
- mediaRSS, JSON, STOM, OpenSearch, iTunes (or Facebook)

disadvantages
- data in the cloud, loss of control
- terms of service
- API lag
- varying support

mashup routine
- make request
- receive structured data
- parse & display
just a matter of passing things into a url
http://www.blip.tv/posts/?.....

code samples
- Jason will help with code samples if you need it

Best practices
- cloud architecture = heavy lifting
- archive locally if you must
- reuse metadata
- outsource file conversion

apps.gov
- promoting cloud computing

don't be “ascared”
- apps.gov
- Google Data Liberation Front - strategic part of Google making certain that you can make sure to do with your data what you want (part of company)
- structured data
- storage and apps running on the network

Developing & Designing for Mobile

2010-04-14T15:56:00.002-04:00

Developing & Designing for Mobile
Jeff Wisniewski
University of Pittsburgh
jeffw@pitt.edu
www.facebook.com/wisniewski

when we think about mobile, we have to think that the number of connections coming from the desktop web will be exceeded by the connections from mobile in the next couple of years (by 2013/14)
(Marvel has a comics generator - an aside)

this talk not about mobile apps, instead the mobile web

app v. mobile web
app
= available offline, as well as online
= higher barrier to entry
= fragmented landscape - platforms
= updates - cyclical
= coolness = high
mobile web
= online onlyl
= lower barrier to entry
= single platform
= continuous updates cycles - can evolve continuously
mobile users
= immediate need for information (so not interested in lending policies)
= context is king (user is already distracted)
= Nielsen says "mobile usability is pretty much an oxymoron"
= small screens, difficult input, speed/latency

"don't make me think!" applies even more in mobile
additionally "don't make me type"
Content for mobile site?
ask your users what they want?
content: built
now --
- directions
- hours
- ask a librarian / text
- contact info
later --
- catalog search & actions (search itself not enough, need to be able to take action/do something with what you find)

content
- be selection - info on need to know basis
- repurpose existing
-- podcasts
-- videos (format? not Flash for iPhone)
- alerts
-- RSS
content: bought
- EBSCO, PubMed, Westlaw, other mobile-optimized article sources
- web-scale discovery services (preindexed) can be mobile-friendly (as opposed to federated search)
- Catalog
-- build
-- buy
-- tweak
-- does your catalog's accessible version work for mobile maybe?

m.home
- create a new mobile optimized homepage (rather than retrofitting) - because info architecture is so different from old homepage to mobile v.
- single column
- single lines
- flattened hierarchy, fewer clicks (more selective in content served for mobile)
- short titles instead of longer, descriptive titles that are recommended for desktop sites
- simple std HTML & CSS mobile doctype declaration

m.markup
- css media type=handheld? lies! - doesn't work anymore
- mostif not all new mobile borwsers ignore the handheld statement (since marketed as "full web")
- media queries work more often - e.g., if screensize href="tel:2037688761"call me

href="sms:1234567890">text me

if page-based site you want to format for mobile only
use display none in css
use html accesskey

accesskey="1" href="http://..."

links will become automatically actionable in order of access keys - will work with selector
m.markup
-webkit-border-radius for rounded corners in mobile
auto resize image (do you even need the image)
combine dependent files
performance issues for website speed
- minify your javascript & css:
www.cssdrive.com/index.php/main/csscompressor/
http://dean.edwards.name/packer/
tell Google - register your mobile site there
make sure you're registered with google local (google small business center)
validate your code
CMS' like drupal, joomla, wp, can auto-create mobile-friendly v.'s
usability testing
- less architectural complexity and more functional complexity
-- test on paper prototypes
- platform proliferation - pick top 2 for testing
analytics
- Google Analytics added mobile tracking recently - so you can see which mobile browsers are coming to your site
- Clicky mobile hardware tracking (pro account or higher)
- filter by user agents (but lots of different ones - 15-20)

mobile OK Checker
- validator.w3.org/mobile
- Google webmaster: developing mobile sites
- mobile speed test (www.mobilespeedtest.com)
- iPhone Interfaceb mockup tool (iphonemockup.lkmc.ch)
- mobile site generator - www.hiddenpeanuts.com/msg/

Example good mobile sites:
-Virginia, NCSU, Oregon State, MIT
- MIT Open source is a web development platform (open source) to help you develop mobile site

In HTML5, can have offline access, so may not need to develop apps

where are links to CMS mobile templates (e.g., Drupal Joomla: mobile_tools in Drupal (http://drupal.org/project/mobile_tools), Joomla mobile extensions (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/core-enhancements/mobile), Wordpress (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-pack/))
Comment from the audience that at one library with mobile, they're seeing download and reading of 100-page pdfs for their Blackberries/other mobile devices - people's willingness to read on mobile phones shouldn't be underestimated

Global Library Landscape

2010-04-13T19:04:00.001-04:00

my notes from the last session I attended today:

Global Library Landscape
Marshall Breeding, Director for Innovative Technologies and Research for the Vanderbilt University Libraries

runs Library Technology Guides website - has done so for many years - http://www.librarytechnology.org/
provides reports and info on library automation field
directory of libraries' automation systems (who's running what) - libwebcats site - http://www.librarytechnology.org/libwebcats/?SID=20100413976867675
ILS turnover report is a new report he developed in Perl to see which systems were migrated off of
- caveat: only as complete as has data (pretty good from United States, once Canada = ok, then non-English-speaking = not so accurate)
his goal is to get more and more information - if you can help Marshall out, please let him know, keep him up-to-date so we can all understand the library automation marketplace (so we can make better decisions)

Another - more complex - report = ILS turnover reverse
"if I had this system today, what are others replacing it with"
tries to track internationally, e.g., in Australia - Public libraries has data
a lot of systems elsewhere we're not so familiar with in the US - such as Bookmark
what is the most used library software in the world? Isis software family developed by UNESCO back in the 60s, did he say? derivatives of it. New version of it, called ABCD (in Spanish) - open source version

Perceptions Report
- has done past couple of years
- 3rd annual survey = Perceptions 2009
- Apollo had great year topped the charts (new), as are Polaris, Auto-Graphics
- Apollo serves underserved libraries - small former Winnebago sites for example
- at his website - perceptions2009.pl - to see it for yourself
- of course, take with a grain of salt, since you hear most from those who are unhappiest (also those overly happy, the middle not as likely to respond)
- free for you to go look at, at his website

General conclusions
- the simpler the problem - the happier the users - single, non-automated libraries easy to please
- large municipal libraries & academic libraries (complex situations) - less happy with automation situation - so can't say that companies that serve the more complex situations
- people running open source ILS' are no happier than those with vendor-supplied
- his interpretation = if you run your own system, though, you'll be more likely to report it better (ergo, the open source must be really bad???)-
Library Journal automation marketplace
- published annual in April 1st issue
- based on data provided by each vendor
- less likely for vendors to give info
- focused primarily on north america
since 2002, has been doing the automation marketplace
- 2010: new models, core systems (base of industry, still = core ILS)
- 2009: investing in the future
- 2008: opportunity out of turmoil
- 2007: an industry redefined
- 2006: reshuffling the deck
- 2005 gradual evolution
- 2004: migration down, innovation up
this past year, terrible year for selling, but some did ok, such as Aleph
[...wow, data on III's Millennium = 157 sales in 2001 but only 45 in 2010, though still 2nd of all of the vendors]

mature systems - no longer based on best or most features, now based on models for future
recurring revenue more important to vendors than 1st-time sales
- software as a service fits that idea
New user interfaces = HUGE ACTIVITY = discovery platforms
- the front door of library through web presence is the most important piece of the system development these days
- not as worried about the back-end right now

Business transitions
- Polaris Library Systems - management buyout - good thing
- LibLime - (open source support services) acquired by competitor PTFS - even in open source, consolidation in fragmented market niche

Key Context = Libraries In Transition
- huge shifts, print to electronic, especially in academic
- key issue = particularly subscribed content, such as articles/databases
- strong emphasis on digitizing local collections
- demands for enterprise integration and interoperability
(if not integrated, system becomes less relevant)
- building for new generation of library users
- digital natives, web-savvy
- web2.0 concepts
- collaborative
Technologies in Transition
- client-server technology = dead
- web services / cloud computing / xml / service-oriented architecture = today
- Beyond Web2.0 (integration of social computing into core infrastructure)
- full spectrum of devices (portables - mobile, iPhone, iPad, etc.)
Dynamics
- evolutionary
- revolutionary
- open source and licensed alternatives
evolutionary path
- gradual enhancement of long-standing ILS platforms
- wraps legacy code in APIs and Web services
- 3 decades' long system deployment in some libraries

rethinking library automation
- working toward service-oriented architectures

can't believe Marshall forgot ByWater in the list of open source solutions support companies... are they too new for him? not sure what the criteria for inclusion are... maybe he'll remember next year... He does have LibLime & PTFS though.

talks about opening up library systems through web services and SOA - using APIs to open things up to proprietary, traditional ILS'

new models of library collection discovery
- from local discovery to web-scale discovery
- lots of non-library websites delivery library info to patrons (Amazon, e.g.)

the model that's still around in library web presence is one of first asking the format someone wants, then delivering to separate system with different look/feel - get rid of menu of siloes

modernized interface:
- single search box
- query tools (did you mean? suggest)
- relevance-ranked results
- faceted navigation
front-end decoupled from back-end
social discovery

Drupal Applications & Practices

2010-04-13T17:52:00.000-04:00

again, just my notes:

Drupal Applications & Practices
Blake Carver, owner of LISHost

missed the beginning of preso - late back from lunch
but basically explained what Drupal is - why it's great, why it sucks (same reasons - e.g., so many modules)
also caught that the most problematic of the Drupal sites hosted at LISHost = one that was designed by a person that was a designer but didn't know Drupal
Mike Anello's list of his favorite 45 Drupal modules (that you may not have heard of)
Jay's List - My Top 50-ish Drupal modules (by topic)

as an end-user, fav module = Twitter modules - everything that gets posted to LISNews tweets out, so Twitter is the biggest referring url
as an end-user, other fav. module = Boost - writes a static html file for the busiest pages, so reduces load on server / speeds up (e.g., for his American Libraries Drupal site)
Drush - Drupal shell utility - VERY powerful - command-line installs, updates, etc.

What's Coming - Drupal 7
- surveys
- better media & WYSIWYG
- performance, security
- auto-upgrade
- usability
- PHP 5.2
- new dashboard & admin pages
making everything easier

Lots of places to find info / help with Drupal
groups.drupal.org - libraries group
drupal4lib mailing list

must-have modules?
though it depends on use of Drupal, Admin menu (will be rolled into Drupal 7)

choosing a good calendar often an issue for libraries
- who's doing this with Drupal - lots of ways to do it, a little tricky & ugly to get started - views, cck, date module (seems fragile though)
------------

NIH Library
James King, Information Architect, National Institutes of Health Library

Wanted to build a pandemic digital archive, for example
- study the 1918 pandemic outbreak publications - over 5K documents collected by an NIH doctor re: 1918 pandemic and similar pandemics (most not covered by pubmed obv., due to age of many publications)
Librarians put together custom lists of publications that answer a need of govt
A lot of custom databases built for this purpose
wanted to put more project mgt into each of these
& to allow for more rapid application development
UPEI's Islandora - (drupal over fedora)!!!!
Purchased a server & Acquia support Nov. 2008
Hired James King, Information Architect in March 2009
schedule on-site Drupal install
first prototype shown - May 28th (in 2 weeks!)
load a module or turn on a feature
content mgt system combined with social publishing system makes it quicker to deploy, because more people are able to contribute whenever they want
sees Drupal, Sharepoint as 3rd generation
1st was static html pages
2nd gen was some interactivity - scripts and databases
3rd gen = every pc of site is loaded into db & managed by system
Many websites running Drupal - Popular Science, Whitehouse.gov
- so clearly completely scalable - can handle as large/complex a site as you want
Initial plan was to catalog the materials originally, then decided to do something more like copy cataloging - talked to Proquest (historical newspapers) & other vendors
a lot of depth in siloed areas
changed scope from just building an index to a creating a community
uses these modules:
- biblio (auto import from Endnote) - scholarly publication handling system
- browscap/mobile tools (for handheld access)
- CCK/Views - to support event/meeting calendar, etc.)
- Entrez (to import from PubMed to Bilio)
- Gmap (to support mapping)
- LDAP/Active Directory
- Taxonomy
- Timeline (to dynamically plot by timeframe)
Going to put a Drupal front-end on their digital repository

SOPAC 2.1 - SOcial OPAC

2010-04-13T17:44:00.002-04:00

SOPAC
John Blyberg, Assistant Director, Innovation & User eXperience
Darien Public Library

SOPAC transformed the way Darien did business with their users
"SOcial" OPAC (online public access catalog) - open source, built on Drupal, and integrate with catalog
To the end-user, the transition from the website to the catalog is jarring - so SOPAC integrates the experience
a cohesive online digital strategy for your library
3 libraries running: Darien (CT), Ann Arbor (MI), Palos Verdes (CA)
2 more libraries coming online: Newport Beach (CA), SAILS Library Network (MA)
how does it work?
SOPAC keeps users in Drupal, a layer that is a social services suite (2 libraries: INSURGE - social data, LOCUM - business rules) & connector piece to allow it to connect to any ILS
SOPAC development is UX-driven (built for end-users, not librarians) - end users don't want to feel stupid
SOPAC had to look good, had to have visual appeal for users
Tagging in SOPAC
- this has changed the way Darien does business
- when user tags something, it gets reindexed - part of keyword search is the tag
- key change from SOPAC1 to SOPAC2
- staff uses tagging feature extensively
- used to have a rack of "staff favorites", now tag in catalog - "staff favorites"
- can sort results list by any number of elements - can browse through "staff favorites"
- added tag for movies that are "better than book"
- "Meet us on Main Street" - program they put on ev. Wed. - "Main St." is part of library - reading group / group reader's advisory - growing in popularity - they hadn't been keeping a list, so then they added a tag for "meet us on main st." & can now browse through that
- "middlesex autobiography" - crowd-sourced a booklist of autobiographies for a teacher, rather than library staff taking time to develop the book list
- other uses, beyond end-user experience
Reviews and Ratings in SOPAC
- some people develop a "voice" & people follow all of their reviews
Hot Fiction
- can track circ data & include into index - can run on the fly - just sort by most popular this week, this month
- favorite fiction search - based on ratings - what your peers like/don't like

SOPAC & "Me"
- building a profile - an identity attached to the library
- hold list - auto-hold - RSS feeds

SOPAC & Drupal
- excited about changes coming in Drupal7, Views3, CCK3
- SAILS website going to go live in a while - prototype - point being, as an open-source project, a portable piece of software, carousel widget showing book covers developed by the developers putting together the SAILS' site
- showed example of CCK3 (CCK allows you to develop "custom content types" - e.g., "videocast")
- John created a content type called "booklist" - could be specific about order, etc. on booklist & it draws in image of book cover (using CCK3) - put in bib #, can choose to add book cover - saves a lot of time
- Drupal allows you to bring all sorts of Drupal tools - jQuery in it, for example
SOPAC & The Physical Library
- how do you take digital experience & bring it into the physical experience?
- screen dedicated to what's going on in library - items just returned show up on screen in library on its "Main St." - can request for staff members to go get them right away from that screen - updates every 10 seconds
- directly from SOPAC data - no reports have to be run
SOPAC 2.1 & Beyond (looking into/developing):
- Twitter integration - reviews, updates, events, overdue notices, requests feedback
- dedicated SOPAC Twitter account - want SOPAC to be able to announce to and listen from Twitter
- playing around with it - figuring out the use case
- Organic Groups - (OG modules in Drupal) - SOPAC can bring people together outside of sphere of influence of librarians - so users can create interest groups on the fly, coupled with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management System) - what users like/don't like (profiles of users) - yes, there are privacy issues, but figuring out how to do that - so that they can be more proactive in even getting people together
- we don't want to be the end destination for users, we want to help build community
- we have inventory management systems, why don't we have customer relationship management systems?
- schema-less bibliographic data storage (Apache CouchDB - schema-less database) - give libraries the ability to dump anything into db
- iPhone & Droid apps - including distributed self-check (using iPhone camera to scan barcodes, for example)

Strategic Planning & Encouraging Change

2010-04-13T16:03:00.001-04:00

my raw notes from the AM session:

Strategic Planning & Encouraging Change

Michael Edson, Director of Web & New Media Strategy, Office of the CIO, Smithsonian Institution

(See many of the resources referred to here at their wiki on wikispaces - e.g.,

http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Commons+Prototype+-+workspace+-+home+page+content )

Showed walk-through of paper-based prototype use

Last year, talked about concept of a Smithsonian Commons

Have been planning & prototyping

The concept is to offer up the amazing resources of the Smithsonian in ways that others can freely and easily reuse and deploy in their own blogs, mashups, websites, wikis, whatever... giving the information consumer freedom in how they consume what the Smithsonian offers & to build on it, to build community, etc.

the preso at Slideshare - http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm

Strategic plan

Larger new 5-year strategic plan in Smithsonian

"earning new relevance" for Smithsonian - "work that matters"

concept of "thermocline" used as a way of understanding the issues

deep conflicts in workplace about the changes that are needed & the need for constant change

also, the concept of "free"
older generation (largely) thinks that giving things away is ridiculous,

younger generation (on the whole) thinks free is an obvious business model

issues:

- complacency

- urgency

John Kotter, A Sense of Urgency (more on the Kotter books at http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5938.html) is required - the 30% of new initiatives that succeed are driven by a sense of urgency

museums now feel that they must accomplish real work in society

accelerated knowledge creation & social change

in old days, used to have to be the best you could be as the given organization

nowadays, MOST innovation occurs outside the walls of a Smithsonian

think big, start small, move fast

Mobile users are changing everything

Myth about the relevance, reach, and impact of orgs like museums & libraries

Smithsonian 2.0 Conference

Workshops to Wiki - Web & New Media process

open up process to as many people as possible

overcome orgs' innate tendency to slow things down

smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com - public wiki
people felt their words were heard because appeared on wiki

wiki became the strategy

one of the reasons strategies fail is that cononical version held statically in one location, rather than on tool like a wiki

Gov2.0 conference - driving change with transparency

- update Smithsonian Digital Experience

- update Learning Model

- balance of autonomy & control (help edge innovators in indiv. Smithsonian museums to innovate)

pain points & opportunities

Smithsonian Commons

more valuable if freely shared than if restricted

wrote experience brief w/4 users - flow of story, what problems are encountered, what they are trying to do - up on Scribd

looked at Flickr stream to see how Smithsonian is used/views by people - used in the experience briefs

let Smithsonian info be mashed up outside of institution

"amateur curators" allowed on Smithsonian commons - reusable data for others' sites, API for others to use Smithsonian assets as desired.

Biggest challenge = overcoming inertia

Well-Organized Sites & Portals

2010-04-12T16:58:00.001-04:00

My raw notes from the last session I attended today (though I haven't posted my Google Wave notes - sorry, out of order):

Well-Organized Sites and Portals

Chris Jasek, User-Centered Design Portfolio Manager, Elsevier

has a Master's in Human Factors

background of research

- as publisher, wanted to know how products were being accessed thru libraries

-- literature research

-- user research

-- reviews of library websites

-- free consultations

well-organized? what does that mean?

tip of iceberg (visual perceptions)

- layout

- visual dsign

- perception

below the surface:

- user's mental model

- user's tasks

- intuition

"People don't come to a website to admire it, they come to get work done"

well-organized? from who's perspective?

- librarian persona

- surgical nursing student persona

Tasks & Pain Points for each

5 steps to a well-organized site

1. (most important) Research users. Understand their needs & tasks.

for Elsevier:

(a) conduct research to find journals,a rticles, books

(b) find course materials (lecture notes, etc.)

(d) find info about library (locations, hours)

(e) get help in using the library or library website

"the biggest mistake is not giving enough space to the task 85% of the people come to the site for"

- users want multiple ways to look for info (e.g., name, subject, type of material, course)

- users want detail (descriptions, fulltext?, access restrictions, "best bets")

- users want help in recovering from wrong path & additional ideas to find more

offer cross/related linking

- users want terminology they understand

- opac (should be find books)

- A&I databases (should be find journal articles

- MOST IMPORTANT - test with your own users

- users want speed

- have no time to wait - website performance

- search needs to work flawlessly & simply, like Google

Survey other sites

- what do otehr sites offer?

- other library sites

- sites in other industries

- examples of latest tech

-DON'T BLINDLY IMITATE (THEY MAY NOT HAVE DONE USER TESTING / THEIR USERS AREN'T YOURS)

FOLLOW BEST PRACTICE DESIGN

- use page real estate wisely (key tasks get most/prime space - top upper left)

- minimize the number of clicks

- use consistent navigation (lessen confusion, build familiarity)

- treat links according to conventions (consistently throughout site)

- use consistent elements (fonts, layouts)

- use few colors / minimal graphics (avoid circuslike, unprofessional appearance)

- provide help link on every page (text, video, chat, helps save support time / cost)

- make your site accessible to all users (W3C accessibility recommendations)

TEST YOUR DESIGN WITH USERS

- MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU CAN DO

- Feedback from your own users is key (offer stakeholders opportunity to observe user testing)

- do user testing all the way through design process

- conducting usability studies is affordable and easy (observation is best, informal studies work well)

- usage tracking also important (google analytics) (though be careful of interpretations)

- focus groups/interviews aren't the best predictors, because what they say & really feel are two different things

ADDRESS ISSUES & REPEAT

- Identify problems, not solutions

people often jump directly to 1 solution to avoid true problem

instead generate a whole field of solutions to test alternatives & find best

- multiple, manageable iterations are important

prioritize

improvements with each iteration

you are never done (because tech changes, users change, expectations change)

"Now, go make your users smile"

pamphlet on how to design library websites to maximize usability - will be posted on conf website

-------------------------

Emily Shem-Tov, Goldmine Program Manager, Adobe

Information Resources Group, part of Market Research group, part of Global Market Research

overarching theme that brings team together

- extending our reach

- raisng the bar

- sharpening our focus

- building connections

Annual campaigns of this library group she's a part of

- supporting pillars

- specific measurable goals

A living document - will it help us meet those themes/goals

End of year evaluation of whether or not met goals/objectives

Portal

- internal, 39K+docs (in PDF, of course - it's Adobe)

- news feeds

- full-text search, flex-based search results (had to overlay Ultraseek with Flex to get higher-level functionality)

- browseable topics

- tailored entry pages for different business units, functional depts., hot topics

- email alerts, RSS feeds, saved searches, social bookmarks

- links to other licensed resources

3 steps to portal

1. planning (user research, surveys, roadmap, design)

2. development (search engine, CMS, taxonomy, tools & features)

3. promotion (marketing, training, tracking)

Goldmine Taxonomy & CMS

- totally customized for our audience & content

- over 1100 topics

- imported into custom CMS

- reviewed quarterly by team

browse & search are both working together

still have a physical library

added a lot of ebooks recently (overdrive, springer)

Sirsi library catalog

digital collections integrated into catalog

A LOT OF MARKETING & OUTREACH, especially on internal blog

ereich@adobe.com

Website Redesign: 2 Case Studies

2010-04-12T15:02:00.003-04:00

My raw notes from the CIL2010 session on:

Website Redesign: 2 Case Studies

Sarah Houghton-Jan

Blogs at LibrarianinBlack.net

San Jose Public Library

known problems

- joint website for 2 libraries - 2 missions - the public library & the academic

- public library users felt ripped off, ignored

- 7 year old design, content, and CMS

- webmaster as gatekeeper = disconnected staff

- ADA requirements cumbersome in existing environment

problems discovered DURING process

- unrealistic expectations from administrators

- 1 year long RFP & contract process

- incompetent graphic designers

- 6 months of lost time due to lost momentum

- merged web team working on 3 sites - univ., public, and shared sites

- incompetent graphic designers

PLANNING

- stakeholders must identify org's goals

- techies, designers, & information architects identify how to meet the goals

- identify your givens (what do you already know about your users - from known / experience, surveys, analytics)

- use planning software (baseCamp, dotproject = open source)

- double the estimated timeline

STAFF & CUSTOMER INVOLVEMENT

- initial satisfaction surveys for both

- card sorting testing for customers early on (users showed that the website shouldn't be merged through card sorting)

- staff focus groups

- mock-up task testing for customers (walk-thru tests)

- transparency to staff and customers

USABILITY

- identify who you are serving

- focus on the few things you do well (user test MOST COMMONLY NEEDED tasks - most commonly needed by public, not staff)

- tell stories of what your users want (what do people come to us for?)

- look for friction points (where do people get mad at you? look for complaints... best people to do testing with...)

- who is the site for again? (e.g., is kids' site for children or their parents)

ACCESSIBILITY

- start simple

- Basic tools: JAWS, WAVE, browser emulators, OS emulators

- Firefox tools: Firesizer, Firefox Accessibility Extension, HTML Validator, Web Developer Extension, WCAG Contrast Checker

COMMUNICATION

- blogs for staff & customers with email & RSS updates

- ask for customer & staff input (AND USE IT!)

- recruit usability testing participants from among "the angry folk"

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

- set deadlines for everything

- hold people accountable

- one person should be in charge of tracking

- give periodic updates to staff/managers

- spend the most time on IA and DESIGN (often get stuck on things like choosing CMS instead) (by design, she seems to be referring to the visual - graphic design along with navigation design)

- keep things moving no matter what (LOST MOMENTUM DAMAGES PROJECT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! PROJECT FATIGUE!!!)

- celebrate small victories

LAUNCH TECHNIQUES

- phased-in launch (notices, pre-testing)

- beta & feedback

- ITERATIVE DESIGN PROCESS via CMS

- = 1.0 + feedback

- = 1.1 _+ feedback (and so on)

- provide brief online & printable orientation

-- if it takes >1 page, start over, your website is too complicated

5 THINGS TO AVOID

- don't try to be fancy when your brain says "no"

- allow consultants to push you around

- have more than 1 project mgr

- stifle creativity

- don't re-invent the wheel

5 THINGS YOU MUST DO

- show your ego to the door

- take risks

- document everything

- research everything

- talk to users continuously

--------------------------------------------------

Georgetown library website redesign

Kristina Bobe, Steve Fernie, Shian-Chih Change, William Wheeler

Concepts that informed redesign:

user-centered design - speaking the user's language
how can we incorporate new technologies into the website?
connecting the dots - resources & users connected
help users help themselves (e.g., what hours are you open?)

a few key components (not whole process)

5 topics covered today:

master task list (know your users... what are their tasks? What are they searching? included catalog search stats, chat reference transcripts, analytics for site, reference desk questions)
- printed list, used scissors & tape - literally cut up list & taped to wall
- what could people not do on current site? what was working on the current site? what could be improved on?
- had staff look at it & see if anything was missing from master task list
usability
- competitive analysis of other ARL websites
- usability testing (I kind of blanked a bit here, since it sounded very familiar from my recent course & was checking in on emails. sorry!)
content management
- switched to Drupal (used to use Dreamweaver. originally looked at Contribute. Instead, decided on full CMS.) Very flexible open-source content management system. No one on staff had previous experience with Drupal, so found it difficult. (Using 30 contrib modules at Gtown.) Has been well-worth investment in time to learn.
subject guides
- LibData - open source authoring platform for subject guides, course guides, and general resource guides - developed by the digital library, U of Minnesota in 2003, development (dev'd in apache, mysql & PHP)
- currently being ported to Drupal by Minnesota
- needed to get subject guide imported from old Cold Fusion / (? database) setup
communication (backstage redesign - using the wiki to keep staff informed - replacing 3 other 'intranets')
- was a stable place, & creative addition, but organization remained a challenge - not common terminology - enabled small group work, but limited cross-group collaboration
- adopting challenges - reminding everyone to go to the wiki
- tool fatigue
lessons learned
- decide, then go on, don't worry if something better comes up
- foundational importance of task analysis (not guesswork when looking at users; refining beyond anecdotes; more, better data)
- wiki enabled better collaboration, not a panacea - still failures to communicate - still need to talk to people
- LibData important step forward, but lack of flexibility (consistency too much for all subjects)
- Drupal key decision (8 months out, still figuring it all out) - but a complex change

Improving Visual Web Experience

2010-04-12T14:52:00.006-04:00

This session's title was "Improving Visual Web Experience", but it really concentrated on several tools that produce visuals - photos, 3-d models, and maps.

These are my raw notes from this AM's session:

Improving Visual Web Experience

I. Using Deepzoom & Photosynth to Improve Patron Experiences

Mike Beccaria & Heather Harrison from Paul Smith's College

Deepzoom - allows you to take large photos & zoom in & out seamlessly - MS tech

in silverlight now (approx. 60% adoption, alt to Flash)

Hard Rock Memorabilia

yosemite Deepzoom Panorama Project

AJAX Demo

only works when you have silverlight in browser

can use the AJAX version, so people don't need to have silverlight installed

How to compose project in DeepZoom Composer

- download software

- create new project, add images

- then "Compose"

- drag & drop images on workspace, make columns, decide how many columns you want

- once created save & Export - Custom - select options for export, preview in browser

- embed in you own website -

- upload project folder to your web server,

dzc_output.xml file

Use in Libraries

1. create a library map

2. digital galleries of student & staff work

- great way to host mini digital collections - can even put on Wordpress

3. scanned pages of a book & display all at once

- use Silverlight & SOLR to search

Photosynth

- merges photos into 3D space

- Microsoft Labs - beta

- freely downloadable software (like DeepZoom)

- incorporated into Silverlight

- go to photosynth.net to find out how to do it

(ex. Obama inauguration site)

- added panoramic feature & can make hotspots on photo data

ideas:

- new books

- magazines

- shelving (use 2D mode) - browse the shelves

- art gallery on display physically - take pics of gallery space

- photosynth makes point plots with x,y,z coords - can hack to get point clouds, which then could be used it for 3D model of library - library tour?

--------------------------------------------------------------

Improving Visual Web Experience

Len Davidson, Catholic University of America

Maps - Google & Bing

Bing just came out with mashup with foursquare

bing.com/maps

get the latest version

- choose map apps

- click on twitter maps

Geochirp.com

Google Fusion Tables

data - visualize on map (google fusion in beta)

aerial photos & historical maps

- NYCityMap

but you can build something like this for free

Can do it in google -

but easier in Bing MapCruncher

US Geological Survey - Earth Explorer (for highest res = charge, but medium res = free)

Choose points to line up, then click render & upload to a web server - layered map - can switch & merge, etc.

besides software, all you need is space on a web server

(that would be really cool for archaeology & my lost road)

location-based social networking

- foursquare.com (see who's using your library)

- Hyatt Regency's FourSquare page

Bing has a live map of foursquare data

Notes on the Website (re)Design Process

2010-04-11T10:28:00.009-04:00

A book that can help you manage a website (re)design project is Web Redesign | Workflow That Works (see http://www.web-redesign.com/).

The process offered in that book is broken down into the following phases:

1. Define the Project

2. Develop Site Structure

3. Design Visual Interfaces

4. Build & Integrate

5. Launch & Beyond

My primary interest in this post is discussion of phases 1 & 2 - defining the project & developing the site's structure. Do this correctly, and you will produce a very usable website. This group of ideas on how to (re)design your site doesn't include such important aspects as setting schedules & budgets, determining when you will need experts (& what type you will need), or anything of that nature. If you follow the Web ReDesign 2.0 process, all of these additional issues will be covered. But my discussion below is sort of an "off the top of my head" list of what you should do to get started planning your (re)design process. So if you have any ideas to add or refinements to make, feel free to comment here.

To start off, don't even think about the visual aspect of what your new site is going to look like... yet. Don't let other collaborators get you sucked into discussing a website that is "cool" or seems "clean". I wouldn't let anyone start wireframing or sketching prototypes. Not yet anyway. Instead, begin with some core concepts.

(BTW, when you do look at other sites, don't just look at comparative sites. The "pros" call this "competitive analysis". But I wouldn't base all of my decisions on other libraries' sites, as there are many library sites that are less than ideal and have never been tested for usability. So they are not necessarily the best guides for how design your site.)

Basically, we want to establish what are you trying to do with your site? What is your (re)design all about?

A. Know, learn, or clarify your organizational mission. The mission of your organization will guide your decision-making. Don't debate semantics of the terminology of a mission statement, but be clear as to what it is your organization is there for, what value it adds to the world.

B. Establish your web presence's mission & goals. What is the purpose of your website? What do your users want from you online? What do they expect? Make certain all collaborators understand the mission and goals.

C. List problem statements about your current site (for those redesigning)

1. Run usability tests with users representative of your general user population. It can be a fairly simple process. For example, prepare a few questions to test how easy it is for users to complete commonly-performed tasks on your site. Don't fail to do this - this may be the most important step you take in your redesign process. (You should also test prototypes of your site with users as you reach later phases of the redesign project.)

2. Look at your website analytics. Note high bounce rates (this is a statistic found in some web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics). High bounce rates can indicate that people coming to your pages are not finding the content they find valuable and are quickly leaving the page(s) in question.

3. Survey end-users / provide an open feedback area about the website & solicit their opinions & suggestions

4. Use checklists, like those found at usability.gov and websitesthatsuck to help you understand what issues your site currently has and which ones are most important (& for a why you shouldn't let your website suck - see this article re: Websites That Suck Increase Stress)

- Common problems:

(1) Navigation - if you get navigation down correctly, that will fix 80% of all usability issues (per CT's Usability Professionals Association president, Michael Rawlins, whom I just took a great course with!)

(2) Terminology/translation of mental models - especially in library sites, it's not uncommon to see the use of acronyms that the library staff may understand but first time users of your library website will not. Have you tested your "labels" for things with real end-users? Do they know what you mean when you're referring to "ILL" or "Databases"? Research has been done on library terms that users understand, so you can find some suggestions for how to deal with this thorny issue. But always test it against your user population.

D. Create a content strategy (You will be guided by the mission & goals of your site, as well as by your survey results, usability testers' comments, and web usage statistics)

1. What type of content do you want on your site? What do users expect (& what do they expect to see on your home page)? Where do you add value? (We understand that there are limited resources for content creation & the number of sites providing content expands exponentially every day, so concentrate on content that you are best suited to providing. If there are alternative sites that do a good enough job on a given topic, you may simply want to point your users to those sites.) Keep the content in line with the mission and goals you established earlier.

2. Who should create and maintain your website? How much should be posted and how often should it be renewed and reviewed? What's your plan for "weeding" the website of outdated/outmoded pages?

3. (for redesign) What content do you have up on your site now? What's most used? What's least used? What has a high bounce rate (which can mean that there's a problem with the page)? How recently has the content been maintained? How usable & accessible is it? Is it designed for the web (e.g., writing in bulleted phrases, instead of long paragraphs... in active voice... web-friendly, non-proprietary file formats used for images and multimedia)?

- If you aren't currently running an analytics tool or web log analysis software of any type, you really should add that, ASAP. Otherwise, you're building in the dark.

4. (for redesign) Inventory of your web assets/online customer touchpoints? For libraries, there can be a lot of these. Ideally, you'd be able to make them work together to provide a seamless and easy experience for the end-user, but that's rarely possible. Still, you should have an inventory of these assets (e.g., your catalog, digital collections, databases). Web2.0 tools make it easy for staff to post content (e.g., to del.icio.us, blogs, flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) - but do you know what they've put online, where that material is and how/whether you can integrate the use of those tools with your regular website (or whether you'll have to migrate the content into the regular website)?

5. (for redesign) Which content will you want to migrate over to the new site? Which content will you have to create fresh (& who will create it)?

E. List your website's requirements

1. What features & functions should the website offer? (What tasks can the user do at your website? e.g., find out the hours of your physical location, buy something online, search the site for user-supplied keyword(s) or phrases...)

2. What are the site qualities you want to ensure?

for example:

- mobility (it works well on mobile devices. More users access the internet through mobile devices than by computer, so this is important)

- accessibility (legally, there are requirements that your website is accessible to users with visual and physical disabilities.)

- findability (search engine optimization has been done to ensure that your pages are easily found at the top of the search results list when relevant searches are conducted.. that it is easy to find information once on the site (e.g., you have a good, persistent/easily found site search engine as well as excellent navigation and bookmarking capabilities)

3. What should the back-end (admin and authoring) processes look like? (this will help you to choose an appropriate content management system or website publishing methodology)

F. List objectives for the site - measures for success of your (re)design project.

1. Increase number of site visits by x% - from X to Y

2. Lower bounce rate for various pages

3. Ensure that at least three posts or articles are put up about the organization every week

4. Move the site from a lower position in Google search results to a higher position when searching on a given phrase

5. Usability tests show that all participants can perform the allotted tasks within the allotted time.

6. Reduction in the number of phone calls to help with features of the website or to learn information that can be found on the site.

The planning is the most important part of the process. You'll need to take further steps to move toward completion of your website (re)design. Some deliverables you may produce during the planning process may include (each one of these could be a whole post unto itself, so I won't go into detail here, I just want you to be aware of these terms & concepts):

- site maps that demonstrate your site architecture

(usability tests: testing the planned architecture, navigation, and terminology/labeling against users' mental models using card sorting, for example and prototypes.)

- system flow diagrams - flow charts of how users will go through tasks on your site (e.g., booking a room reservation)

- personas & use cases

- wireframing/prototyping - you can use a number of tools, including simple sketching, to wireframe (create a mockup of various pages or a storyboard of a series of pages) your site & test people's reactions to the wireframes when laying out pages.

Finally, I should add that each one of the challenges you face - whether it's related to project management or how specifically to create a given function (e.g., design patterns for when/where/why/how to use web page elements like drop-down boxes) - has been faced by other webmasters. Standardized solutions have been developed, such as design patterns and tools like layout grids, content management system themes/templates, color scheme generators, and so on can be used, often at no cost. You should use them instead of reinventing the wheel. After all, you've got enough to do already!

My bookmarks for website design / usability:

http://delicious.com/sbclapp/usability

Getting grounded in website design concepts

2010-04-11T09:15:00.008-04:00

What if someone you knew - not a librarian, not involved in libraries at all, in fact - told you they were going to create their own library ... that they were going to collect & circulate books to the public.
"How hard can it be? After all, all you have to do is get a building, some shelves, some books & then sign them out," they might say.
But because you're a librarian, you know that some of the seemingly most simple concepts are the hardest to execute effectively. So you start asking them questions, to get them to realize what issues would arise:

how will you get the funding?
what books will you buy to loan out?
how will you organize the books so that they can be found?
who will you loan the books to?
how will you get the books back? what if they're damaged?

Hundreds of other questions will bubble up through your mind, because - after all - you understand how complex an organization the library is.
Similarly, when I hear people talk about building websites without much of a plan or concept of the work involved, I worry about the website that will result - particularly if its goal is to represent the library. We should be serving up sites that add to our organizational and professional credibility.
To impress you with the breadth and depth of web work being done in the commercial sector these days, I could start spouting off the types of specialized positions that one can train for that only deal with one specific aspect of building websites:

graphic designers
developers (people who write or tweak the code behind the websites)
content producers
search engine optimizers
information architects
usability specialists / interaction designers / user experience designers
database managers
system administrators

...and there are doubtless many more. There are also sub-specialties and various flavors of these specialties.
But I digress, the point is not to discourage librarians from engaging in website building, it's just to impress upon them that it's a complex process, if you're doing it well. If you fail to work through a planning process you may build something, but it's going to be, at best, a Rube Goldberg device and at worst, it will show up at
http://websitesthatsuck.com
Ideally, libraries would be able to handle their websites with the help of professionals, much as they handle construction projects using people who specialize in building things, such as engineers, architects, contractors, plumbers, electricians, and so on. Unfortunately, there's a widely held perception that anyone can create a website easily. And they can. It's just that doing so without a deeper understanding of concepts involved is more akin to building a tree house than than to building a structure that meets today's construction codes, has structural integrity, and is designed to accommodate the users' needs.
I also understand the constraints that libraries are under. Governments that barely provide enough money to staff their physical libraries are not willing to pay for things like professional website design (especially since there's that misperception that anyone can quickly, easily, and inexpensively build a website). So, at the very least, librarians can do what they do best, arm themselves with research and knowledge ahead of time. Their best bet is to try and understand the basic web concepts that provide a foundation for professional web workers.
Terminology and concepts that you should understand if you're going to be involved in designing/redesigning a website (even if your role is simply to be a part of a website design committee) include:

accessibility (ensuring that your site is accessible to all users, even those with visual and physical impairments)
findability (the ability of users to identify an appropriate website and navigate the pages of the site to discover and retrieve relevant information resources - see also: Peter Morville's site -
http://findability.org/)
search engine optimization (SEO) (ensuring that your site / pages are well represented in search engine results)
usability, user experience design (ux), interaction design

Usability is a qualitative attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use, including such aspects as:
- Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
- Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
- Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they re establish proficiency?
- Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
- Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?
This is a key diagram for understanding the user experience design process:
http://www.jjg.net/elements/pdf/elements.pdf )

design patterns (tested solutions to common web design elements/problems - see examples at http://www.welie.com/ & http://www.designofsites.com/design-patterns/)
information architecture, taxonomy
[graphic design-related] color theory, typography
content management system (a comparison of web content management systems is available at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/), open source
templates, cascading stylesheets (css), include files

A must-have resource designing usable sites is http://www.usability.gov
To get a basic understanding of accessibility in website design, go to http://www.w3.org/WAI/gettingstarted/Overview.html.
Finally, you should always seek advice on standards (e.g., for code standards - such as testing html and css for validity) from www.W3.org
Some great website design blogs include: http://www.alistapart.com/, http://www.boxesandarrows.com/, http://www.useit.com/, http://blog.jjg.net/
Books to help you with key web design concepts: http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=sclapp&offset=0&previousOffset=0&collection=67420&shelf=list

Lessons in design from a life well-loved

2010-04-08T07:41:00.004-04:00

The theme of the past couple of weeks in my life has been one of putting others ahead of yourself. First, there was the usability design class I'd been taking the past two Wednesdays. Then there was the passing of a lovely 100-year-old woman - my grandmother-in-law - Grandma B.
The key takeaway from the course was to make the user of your (... software, device, or website... ) "king". Their needs, their feelings about the designed (...software, device, or website...) trump all other considerations. You should never design a website based on what you personally find "cool" or think is best without at least running it past others - in other words, doing usability tests throughout your design process and taking to heart what users have to say about what you're building.
At the same time, I've been thinking about what made Gram so special to everyone whose lives she touched and what made her able to live so long - and honestly, I think it was that she always thought and cared about others. She remembered everyone's birthdays, their relationships and their people, who was important to them. That's one lesson that Gram could teach us all, and it's one that could even guide those of us involved in designing websites - what is important to others? Others' needs and feelings must guide our designs, rather than our own opinions or thoughts on what we think is important. If we prioritize the needs and emotions of others as we design, we will create a positive (and hopefully long-lived) relationship with the users of our sites (or devices or software).
So Gram, thank you for all of your lessons.

Digital Novices & the Race Online 2012

2010-03-29T10:39:00.002-04:00

I love this article (referred to by Bernie Sloan on the Web4Lib listserv) about the "Race Online 2012" happening in the UK & the production of leaflets with everything digital novices need to know about going online (thx to Google) -- http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/28/google-leaflet-internet-guide
I think the ALA should sponsor a similar "race online" (or any other body of libraries) for the U.S. & work with Google (or other partners) to make it a reality.

BTW, on a related front, my mom finally reported back that - for the 1st time, she'd managed to get into her Yahoo email account without help from the librarian at her local library. I knew she could do it! Congrats go out to my mom & gratitude to the reference librarian(s) who've helped her on her journey these past few months.

Libraries and the social contract

2010-02-11T18:11:00.004-05:00

In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely talks about the market vs. the social contract. He demonstrated that once a service or relationship is assigned a dollar value, it is perceived as being a commodity subject to the rules of the market. In one example, he talked about how a daycare provider in Israel required parents to pick up their children by a certain time. At first, they just used the "social contract" method to enforce this rule. Then they decided to impose fines for late pick-ups. The moment they switched to fining parents, the number of parents picking up children skyrocketed! The assignment of a monetary value to the late pickup suddenly made it possible for parents to analyze the comparative costs for being on time vs. picking the child up late. More importantly, since the parents were now paying for late pickups, they no longer felt guilt about their lateness. The time had become something that they could simply purchase. When the daycare tried to revert - no longer fining the parents for late pickups - and instead relying on the guilt factor of the social contract, it didn't work out. Once the social contract had been broken, it couldn't be repaired (or at least not right away). In another example, attorneys were asked to do work for (if I recall correctly) a nonprofit group (that served the elderly???) at discount rates. No attorneys volunteered. Then the group asked for pro bono attorneys and a large number volunteered. They had shifted from a market mindset (the attorneys, when in market mode, wouldn't accept the low rate that was offered) to the mindset of being good citizens (the social contract).

I've been thinking (like so many of you) a lot about what kind of future we can expect for libraries - where libraries fit into people's lives today and whether or not they'll fit into people's lives at all in decades to come. What's our role, I keep asking myself. Where do we add value? I've tried to think about why so many well-read, educated, public radio-listening people I know don't use their public libraries. Is there a social contract between libraries and their community members? Can it be built upon / reinforced? Why do some members of the community feel so alienated from their libraries? What if we did simple appeals, like NPR, that made people feel good about just using their libraries (and if they wanted to up their engagement, contributing to it)? What if we reminded them that "being green" means consuming less and consuming less means borrowing (not buying) materials? I think the social contract is a really good way for libraries to explain their value. After all, where else can members of the public deal with an organization that has no ulterior motive, no strings attached, that is solely about providing them with information, education, entertainment, and community? What other organizations work on the thorny issues of protecting (not making money off of) their private information? What other organizations are actively grappling with digital preservation issues? Google has "scooped us" on so many other fronts, but they are a commercial interest and - although they claim "do no evil" as their corporate mantra - they don't have a social contract with the people like we do.

The Echo Chamber - Overcoming Dysfunctions of a Team

2010-01-29T13:02:00.005-05:00

So I’m following the whole Echo Chamber thing with great interest. More posts (http://thewikiman.org/blog/?p=454 & http://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/dismantling-the-echo-chamber/ & comments)…

Again, we’re talking to ourselves, but more importantly, we’re talking among ourselves. That allows us to refine what it is we mean and want to say… which is a good thing. As Ned Potter (the wikiman) and Andy Woodworth (and probably other folks I've forgotten to mention) pointed out, maybe the echo chamber is useful in refining the ideas until what finally gets beyond this circle of librarian bloggers is a better idea.

It reminds me of my surprise to read that one of the “five dysfunctions of a team" was an unwillingness to disagree ("fear of conflict") - see http://librarywebhead.blogspot.com/2009/12/overcoming-five-dysfunctions-of-team.html.

Well, the first dysfunction is a lack of trust. Once you establish trust among team members, they all have to feel comfortable enough to voice their concerns -- to engage in debate. Without that debate, some very poor decisions can be made. It’s the old “the emperor has no clothes” syndrome. There are a plenty of folks who loathe confrontation and seemingly too many who thrive on it. But neither way brings us where we need to be. We have to trust one another and support one another enough to have constructive engagement. As people on the team, one of our roles is to speak up, another is to support and respect all other members of the team, regardless of whether or not they argue against our position.

I’ll commit. Among the community of librarians – let me say, I trust you. I might be right, I might be wrong, but I’ll say what I think and I’ll trust you – not only to support me when (from your perspective) I hit the nail on the head, but to take me on, to comment, blog, tweet, whatever, when you thing I’ve got it all wrong. Just let’s remember tone, so we don’t scare any confrontation-averse folks (myself included!) from the discussion. There are so many brilliant people out there in libraryland, even if they don’t speak up online – let’s harness that energy! This debate isn’t about tearing one another apart, it’s about building something better -- together (oh yeah, and keeping the library relevant in the 21st-century +).

The value of libraries in the 21st-century

2010-01-29T11:41:00.003-05:00

So I also asked the people I'd mentioned (who weren't big library users) to describe to me what it was they'd ever loved about libraries or what would bring them into libraries.

The first person I asked - my voracious reader who felt disaffected from her local public library these days - what she used to love about the library. (Because she'd mentioned liking the library so much as a child...) She talked about the sense that it was a space of limitless discovery, that whole unexplored universes were available to her on the library shelves, that no ideas were off-limits. She could just lose herself in the stacks.

I remember that sense of wonder when - as a child - you enter the library and see this dizzying array of books, colors, and opportunities. So that made total sense to me.

For my second person (yes, my husband), who doesn't read a lot, but who likes doing things in his workshop, he mentioned the concept of a "tool library" like one we'd seen (in Berkeley?) when we lived out in California... This reminded me of a concept I've had in mind for quite a while now, using the library as a community exchange center for programs like BookMooch, where people can trade books, but there is the enforced accountability of doing it through something like a third-party organization and where the delivery can be easily managed by the library. Especially, if the library starts working to send materials by mail, like NetFlix does. But that's a whole other topic, because there's other useful aspects to the NetFlix business model besides the material delivery process.

That second thing might sound like a stretch, but let's get all of the ideas on the table, before we knock any of them out of the running. The point is to ask people what they need from a public, community space like a library... what needs aren't being met elsewhere, just to get a much broader array of ideas.

Libraries Engaging the Community

2010-01-29T11:22:00.004-05:00

I love this TEDx presentation by OCLC librarian Chrystie Hill. If you haven't already watched it, please do. She's speaking outside the echo chamber (#echolib) about the issue that's central to libraries today - remaining relevant. In it, she talks about the role of library in connecting people to one another. She says so many other things (so much more eloquently than I can), I'll just put the YouTube video here.

BTW, if you'd like to link to her discussion of the TEDx Columbus presentation, go to http://scanblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/tedx-columbus.html

Making Libraries Relevant in the Future

2010-01-25T20:24:00.003-05:00

You’re not going to like this post, even if you think I’m part of the “echo chamber” (not sure I qualify - I’m not one of the “cool kids” I follow – you know the ones who do presentations at all of the library conferences).
First, Seth Godin committed no “sins” in his posting on the future of the library when he wrote the following:

What should libraries do to become relevant in the digital age?
They can't survive as community-funded repositories for books that individuals don't want to own (or for reference books we can't afford to own.) More librarians are telling me (unhappily) that the number one thing they deliver to their patrons is free DVD rentals. That's not a long-term strategy, nor is it particularly an uplifting use of our tax dollars.

Though I know a lot of my fellow librarians took him to task for saying that libraries need to become relevant (see: http://thewikiman.org/blog/?p=433), I don’t think they should’ve. I think they should’ve realized that this is how many people feel (those outside of the echo chamber of librarians and highly supportive library patrons).

Honestly, Seth spoke for America. We’ve known since the OCLC 2005 perceptions of libraries survey that the library’s “brand” = books.
But if that’s the case, libraries ARE irrelevant, because In this day and age, most of the people I talk to (who aren’t librarians or related to librarians) see Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or bookmooch-type sites as better places to find books online and more locally, they usually get their books from friends, colleagues, book/tag sales, or bricks-and-mortar book stores. (With the rise of the ebook readers that grab content directly from retailers like Amazon, we are growing even less relevant...)

Among my in-laws, for example, (though most of them really like to read) not one of them regularly goes to the public library or uses the library as their primary source for books.
Many Americans don’t have that much time or will to read a huge collection of books anyway. So maybe they get in a dozen or two books per year, best case scenario. They can usually afford to purchase or borrow those books themselves without using the library. They’re more liable to consume information and entertainment through the internet, television offerings, radio, or movies.

I’m going to confess something right now -- I don’t read. At least not the way you’d imagine a librarian would read. I laugh when anyone asks me to recommend a book, simply because I’m a librarian. I hardly ever read books. At least, rarely for pleasure, and rarely in full. I usually read magazines, online postings/articles, or segments of books (ebooks included in this) for reference purposes. I don’t have either the time or the energy to do much more. I’d say that I read complete books probably about 6 times a year. Maybe half of those times I’m reading something fictional and entertaining. Mostly for entertainment, I (gasp!) watch television or movies.

So, books... Not a good brand for libraries if they want to be sustainable. I'm guessing that’s not something that even most of the great folks I'm fans of in the Library2.0 echo chamber would admit. I feel badly about saying this -- I’m not saying this to make my colleagues feel badly or to say that we don’t need to support books at all, but rather I say it because we all need to understand the world from a non-librarian perspective in order to understand where we fit into the lives of most people.

I asked two people close to me why they don’t go to the library. Neither of these people were librarians.

The first person was my husband. He’s not a voracious reader, but he likes to read on occasion and – more importantly – often needs reference materials for his projects. But two problems with that: (1) things like the wiring diagram for our ’69 Charger are needed long-term so it’s better to buy the service manual than to seek it at the library; (2) his recent interest in learning how to become a gunsmith was completely unsupported, not only by our local library’s collection, but by the library network’s collection. All of which brought to mind (for me) how many stereotypically male hobbies and interests are not well-represented in our library collections.

How about a voracious reader with more mainstream needs? I talked with a good friend of mine, who’s extremely bright and interested in array of titles and topics. She seemed a perfect fit for the uber-patron. But when I asked her about using the library and she said that no, she never went to her local library any more. I asked her why (over coffee at a Barnes & Noble) and she responded that she didn’t like going there. Besides the library not offering the positive experience of a bookstore like the one we were in at the time (ambience-wise), she felt like she was putting the librarians out – like the library was their private club and that they didn’t care for people “borrowing their precious books”. While that might be a commentary on a specific public library, she had an even better insight about the problematic business model of the public library. She had so many interests, she told me, that she would start several books simultaneously. Sometimes she’d get through them, start to finish, other times she’d put them aside (or one aside) for a while. She wouldn’t be able to finish up in the limited loan period of the library book. She couldn’t predict how and when she’d be able to finish a book. Work stress, family obligations, and life in general sometimes got in the way. I know, I know, it's possible her library might've allowed for online renewals to help deal with that, but it's one more thing for her to remember and deal with (not to mention that it might not allow the renewal if the title was wanted for another patron or it was a new book or the library's system just didn't support online renewal).

So, instead of going to the library, she gets her books by buying them or through an informal network of acquaintances who hand them on when they’re through with them. The informal book exchange has the added benefit of making her feel more connected to the people involved in the exchange. Plus, it provides her with reader’s advisory from people who know her personally.

Hear Freakin', Hear! UXD in libraries

2010-01-21T16:51:00.003-05:00

For those of you who haven't yet heard of this top tech trend for 2010, take a look at Library Journal's new column "The User Experience" - http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6713142.html - about user experience design in libraries.

Author Aaron Schmidt, the digital initiatives librarian for the District of Columbia Public Library, points out that every aspect of our interaction with a library user is affected by design, including such seemingly mundane policies as having staff wear name tags. The whole article is worth a read, but I love the teaser Schmidt leaves us in preparation for his next column:

"The thing that unites Renner, Ranganathan, and all these UX elements is empathy. If I've convinced you to take your role as a library experience designer seriously, this core value should be your launching pad. What does this look like in real life? You need to listen to and observe your community in order to develop an empathetic focus on people. My next column will be about this important process and how libraries can truly use it to innovate."

Library Journal, you got it right! We need a column like this for librarians right now. We might be a decade behind in discovering the power of user experience design, but we can catch up - c'mon everyone, let's spread the word.

Integrating Social Media Into Your Website

2010-01-20T14:42:00.002-05:00

Some notes from the January 19th TechSoup (free webinar) on Integrating Social Media Into Your Website:

Social media account management issues

· The use of social media tools is only effective if it is implemented as part of a broader communications strategy for your organization

· Even if you are just contemplating use of social media tools for your organization, it is worth it to reserve your “virtual real estate” & to do so using a consistent naming strategy (e.g., always branded “CtStateLibrary” or whatever – Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Virtual web2.0 real estate should dovetail with domain name management.

· When you set up accounts, never do it with an individual staff member’s email address (e.g., set up an email alias on your domain for web2.0 account building). Preferred method = have a paid staff member (not a volunteer) do this.

· Have an inventory of all online venues & information about who has ownership access to the accounts. The username/password accessible to backup person (but probably not stored in a larger mgt spreadsheet, due to security concerns) in case primary account holder is unavailable.

· Keep control of your virtual real estate (see the previous 2 points)

· Control and backup your data, as with any other web content. Your Facebook account should be considered another one of your data repositories. But back the data up redundantly and keep it under your control. Web2.0 tools are free and may disappear.

· Privacy: “honor ‘theirs’, assert ‘yours’”. Don’t mistakenly give away your followers’ / fans’ information. Add social media to your privacy policy.

· Monitor and track “channels”. Where is growth, engagement? What are trending keywords/interest points? Monitor usage, statistics, etc., regularly (this firm looks at how the channels are doing weekly)

· 3 essential processes for mgt:

o Message calendaring: have a 3 to 6-month horizon. Your social media messages can have a narrative arc. You must sustain consistent messaging across channels. Send users back to the website.

o Publishing matrix: integrated way for deciding which messages go to which online channels. A spreadsheet. (see: http://www.aspirationtech.org/training/eadvocacy/templates/publishingmatrix for an example)

o Social media dashboarding: pull together tracking tools on a single site/page to view thinks like keyword tracking, what people are saying about your organization, etc. Use iGoogle or NetVibes page. Radian6 is an excellent tool, but is costly. Ask is your messaging propagating? What are the reactions? Who are your targets, opponents, decision-makers & are you getting through to those you need to get through to?

Deploying social media

· Start with easiest = Twitter, then more complex = Facebook

· Only start if you can commit to regular maintenance of channels

· Each channel has a different purpose, but these purposes depend on the organization

· Always use the social media channels to funnel users back into virtual real estate you hold – e.g., it is a bad practice to put your whole press release on a Facebook status update. Instead, have your press release on your website (or blog) and then use a less formally-worded FB status update with a link to the full press release or tweet out the link to the press release.

· One reason to always move interested users back to your primary web real estate is that those are the only places you actually control. It matters if, for example, Facebook disappears, you only want to have lost references to primary data, not the primary data itself (which is under your control if it is on your website or blog).

· Marketing is key – social media channels, like all initiatives, require marketing to be successful.

· Realize that in social media, you do not control the message. Your audience can say what they want.

· There are several levels at which you can use social networking tools like Facebook, twitter, etc., ranging from the lowest level of end-user engagement, to the highest (greater engagement is an important goal for an organization)

o Announcement service

o Lightweight communication

o Collaborative hub

o Immersive community engagement

· There were several great “spectrums” the presenter offered to make the role, implications, and effects of different web tools clearer to us. All of the spectrums included the elements:

o Twitter

o Facebook

o Blogging

o Email

o Website

Twitter is liable to have the users “closest to your organization” following you. Websites are on the other end of the spectrum, with completely anonymous users arriving at pages from search engines, who may have no interest in your organization.

· The tone & voice of the Twitter channel is generally “first-person singular ‘I’”. It is informal and fun. On the other end of the spectrum (the website), there is little spontaneity, the tone is formal – usually the third-person for the organization or first-person plural “we”

In short, for social media tools to be used effectively and sustainably, they must be planned for, managed, and maintained. They must be part of a broader organizational strategy and must be regularly measured to see if they are meeting the needs of the organization. There is one organization (the Humane Society) that the presenter cited as having a very effective social media presence, but they’ve actually hired a full-time person solely for this purpose.

(Since we can’t even convince libraries that they need to have professional webmasters to manage the websites they control – I don’t foresee libraries hiring full-time social media coordinators. Too bad.)

BTW, Techsoup is offering this excellent webinar again on Feb. 4th. See: http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webinars/index.cfm

The digital literacy divide

2010-01-18T08:28:00.004-05:00

My mother is a very intelligent woman.
I don't say that just because she is my mother, you understand, but because she is. She has an intense sense of wonder, curiosity, and playful optimism about the world. She loves her library. She loves books. She loves learning. 
But - mea culpa - she stands on the other side of the digital divide from me and my sister (and most of America, these days).
My mom was a registered nurse. She'd gone to nursing school back in the day when that was how you became a nurse. She was very good at what she did. She was one of the first nurses to be trained in recovery care for angioplasty patients (a couple of decades ago, angioplasty was a fairly new procedure). 
She retired as early as she could, however. Partly because she was driven out by technology - by computers, to be more precise. At that point, the field of nursing had changed so much that despite her expertise, she would've had to return to a traditional college program and get a bachelor's degree (as she put it, learn to take a temperature after 20 plus years of nursing) just to get ahead at the hospital. But that was ok, because she'd never really wanted to be a manager. But when the computers came, and the workflow changed accordingly, it was yet another pressure on her. From what she tells me, I gather that with repeated training and repetition of the procedures, she was able to learn how to write up her lab slips on the computer. That was in an age before email was a part of the workflow for most people, so I suspect it was a terminal/mainframe setup, in which she learned (as she puts it) "which buttons to press". Then she retired. Yes, there were other reasons, but the rate of technological change and the rise of computers in the workplace were important factors. 
After she retired, email and the web arose as key elements of the workplace, but by then, she'd had no reason to learn how to work with those technologies. For years now, my sister and I (both librarians) have served as "her internet". At last year's Web2.0 Expo in New York, I listened to an anthropologist discuss how in rural India, those who are illiterate use those who are literate and computer-savvy to "be their internet". They'd dictate emails to a child, who would type them in and send them off, then read the replies aloud for them. Though my mom is quite literate in terms of reading, this description sounded eerily similar to what my sister and I had done for my mom. 
My mom straight up wasn't interested in computer literacy, so my sister and I had let it go. She'd laughingly refer to herself as a "dinosaur" or protest, why do I need to know how to do that? I'll just write a letter (even buying herself a surprisingly inexpensive electric typewriter at a tag sale to make letter writing quicker). Briefly, I'd imagined teaching her how to use email and the web. But when I thought about the cost of getting her a computer and internet connection, especially one that would fit into her snowbird lifestyle (this was in the days before NetBooks and reasonably-priced laptops), plus the pain of trying to explain it all to her and support her without getting inappropriately snippy (since my daily help desk battles had already left me a bit burnt out on supporting such technology), it just didn't seem worth it to me. I think it was the same for my sister. She had it worse than me, after all. She wasn't a systems librarian, but a reference librarian, already somewhat overwhelmed by the challenges of guiding patrons through the vicissitudes of technology all day long. So when my mom needed information on her own medical conditions, my sister & I just did the research for her and printed it out. She understood what the articles meant and gave us enough information to conduct meaningful searches for her, so it all worked out.
 Last night, I called my mom to see how she was doing. It turned out that she's decided that she really needs to learn use the computer and to figure out email. For all of her social groups these days, they ask for her email address and it's gotten to the point where she's missing out on important information by avoiding this whole internet thing. (And I think she's a bit embarrassed that she sees others in her generation and even older than her who understand how to use email and the web.)
 In addition, she's taking an adult education course in anthropology right now - on sub-saharan africa! She loves the course and the professor, but the additional readings she wants to review are all online. I felt a pang of guilt as I listened to her and realized that - once again - my mom was missing out because of her lack of basic internet literacy. And here I work on the web every day. I advocate for librarians to embrace Web2.0. I don't spend much time thinking about the many otherwise competent adults out there who need help with these basic skills. 
When my sister and brother-in-law spent the holidays with her, they brought her down to her local public library and got her hooked up with a Yahoo email account. (My mom's description was something like "they told me which buttons to push".) She'd tried to send my sister an email, which she told me had never made it through. She had no idea which buttons she'd hit. or how she'd done what she'd done (or not done). She hadn't wanted to "interrupt" the reference librarian, whom she described as being very busy, but eventually, she'd had to in order to check her email. She said it took her almost an hour (which is the limit on public computer use at her library), but she'd successfully managed to send an email to my sister. Unfortunately, she couldn't understand what everything meant or how to repeat the proces the next time she went to the library. Moreover, she has to sign up for a computer ahead of time, which poses yet one more barrier to her - one more process to learn - one more frustration to face.
 She said that she didn't want to keep "bothering" the librarians (yes, she may be extra sensitive to this because my sister is a public services librarian herself).
My mother and I commiserated about the overworked, underpaid, much needed role of public librarians as my mother recounted her tale. So none of this is to cast aspersions on her local library (which she adores) or her librarians (whom she holds in the highest regard).
Still, think of how difficult it must be to be in my mother's position, though -- to feel like you can't figure out what every one else seems to have no problems with, to have to ask someone for help to do something that is basic to 21st-century life.
I thought that her local public library might've offered basic computer classes, but she said that when she asked the librarian about a basic computer class she was told that the library had been trying to put together a course on helping people use their laptops. But this doesn't help someone like my mother, who isn't there yet. My mother asked me where she might be able to find a class that she could take that would help her. 
So, does anyone in the Clearwater, Florida area know of any place someone like my mom can learn the basics of getting comfortable with a computer, email, and the web? 
More importantly - in an era when the public is questioning the very need for libraries, why aren't libraries at the forefront of the digital literacy issue. Why don't we develop a nationwide digital literacy initiative? It could include a preset curriculum that even the smallest public libraries could use to get people online. This seems like a no-brainer. Maybe it's already out there and (as so often happens with great library programs) under-publicized? If so, PLEASE CORRECT ME!
If not, consider this a call to action.

Top Tech Trend = User Experience Design

2010-01-18T08:26:00.001-05:00

Doing my usual - following conferences from afar (thx to Twitter & the interwebs, at least I don't miss everything).
LITA held a discussion on Top Tech Trends this morning... for more, see http://litablog.org/. I felt validated by the discussion since one of the topics that dominated the discussion was user experience design. (& yes, I both saw & agreed with the tweet "@gluejar: Depressing that usability is a trend in 2010. 10 years late"... true, but this just supports my oft-pronounced theory that library technology is 10 years behind... )
Amanda Etches-Johnson referred to automated usability testing sites - Usabilia (http://usabilla.com/) & Crazy Egg (http://crazyegg.com/). I'd heard of Crazy Egg, but not Usabilia. That one's new on me. It has a free, five-page trial. If one of you uses it first, please give me some feedback. I'd love to hear about it.
Another thing I saw from afar was @libraryfuture's Prezi-based presentation (mobile libraries). It inspired me. I'd written a long, boring bulleted "what to post where" listing to give our public services librarians a feel for when they should put things on our news blog vs. our Facebook page vs. our Twitter stream (& how those updates automatically cascade from one level to another). I sent it out to my Web2.0 group for feedback & didn't get much. So I made a Prezi to make the same information appear more compelling. (http://bit.ly/6ushBe) Imagine if we all did our memoes & policies using a tool like this! (BTW, it was a real pain to get used to Prezi at first, from my perspective. Then again, I'm not a gamer & it may be somewhat more intuitive for folks who are. Still, I think that it was all worth it.)

A look back at my last decade working with library systems

2010-01-01T10:29:00.003-05:00

Like everyone else (e.g., my Twitter buddies), I've been thinking about the past decade as a whole and what it's meant. I started by thinking about the arc of my career in library systems, such as it's been and then, more importantly, began to think about what this past pivotal decade has meant for libraries.
The first bit - my own career - I look back on with a combination of nostalgia, pride (intermingled with the occasional cringe-worthy memory), and amusement. I never thought I'd still be in the field 11, going on 12 years after I began with a library automation network. What I remember about working with library systems in my little part of the world at the turn of the century (1999/2000) is listed below. (Feel free to comment & correct me, btw):

* I was working on a Tandem mainframe-based system. We had pretty much just finished converting everyone from what we called the "old" dumb terminals to a pc-based system, with terminal emulation to support our still-text-based Integrated Library System. The "buzz" in libraries was all about client/server technology, with the occasional minority voice advocating for the use of thin client systems that seemed to be more of a compromise between what worked best in each environment.

* I believe we had just deployed our first generation web-based catalog. Before that it was the old text termiinal-based OPAC.

* I had poo-pooed the original Unix web server we had, thinking that we needed a Windows server because, after all, everything was about the GUI in those days and the command line unix just seemed hopelessly outdated. So I remember the switchover to a Windows NT web server being a great (if in my mind, overdue) move. How funny that I'm now pushing my current place of work to move from a Win2003-based web server to a Linux box! What goes around comes around, I guess. Another great lesson in folly on my part - I used to have a certain prejudice against those who used Macs. I'd graduated from the little self-contained IIse boxes to the use of pcs. I was quite certain that Apple would soon be dead and that those who clung to this technology were misguided and just couldn't handle the sophistication of the Windows environment. (Note: I'm writing this from my home Mac mini & I did battle with our IT department in the past year to get a MacBook Pro for work. But yes, I run a Windows XP Pro virtual machine, since we're predominantly a Microsoft shop.)

* We were grateful that Y2K never turned into a disaster, but there'd been a lot of work behind the scenes to ensure that the code on our mainframe, for example, had been updated to ensure a smooth beginning of 2000. And then there were the patches to be applied to those pesky spreadsheets, and so on. I'm not a programmer, so I don't know how close we truly all came to disaster.

* The websites were built on static HTML, with no separation of style and content. There was no blogging yet, at least none that we really knew about. The easiest sytem, such as it was, was to create a site on Geocities, which - if I recall correctly - had an online wysiwyg editor. That was probably our closest thing to blogging in that time. I had a personal Geocities site, and published up information about our wedding. At the time, HTML seemed complicated to me! ;) Our libraries - the more sophisticated ones - used FrontPage to create their sites. I think there were a few outliers using Dreamweaver, but FrontPage was the solution that I came to know best. I'll be honest - you could actually do a lot with FrontPage Server Extensions to control things like subweb permissions, for example, though I don't know how many people exploited its fuller potential. We used table-based layout & the replacement of one image with another through the basic javascript to make it seem like you were pressing a button onmouseover seemed pretty slick to me at the time. "Push technology" and personalized web portals were just showing up, but they would fail in their first iterations, only to become regular features in the web world in slighly altered ways. Now "push technology" = RSS & many websites require you to create a login but most of these sites don't expect you to anchor your whole online life there, with the notable exceptions of personalized homepages like iGoogle and - of course - Facebook.

* For inventory control and offline situations, there was an emergency "Auxiliary Circulation" setup that just cached barcodes. The inventory control module required a special scanner device that was completely devoid of any intelligence, but mobile. You could bring it out to the stacks and scan in barcode numbers. You'd then bring the device back to a circ terminal & plug it in. Plug & play was just beginning & was imperfect. I don't even think we had USB yet (or it wasn't widely adopted). I think we were using the PS2 mouses (& that was an upgrade from the serial ones). We used parallel ports for printers.

* We were using peer-to-peer networking, had no firewall yet, and felt that "security by obscurity" was good enough because - after all - who would target libraries? The word was already getting out about such practices not being good adequate, but we hadn't fully drunk the KoolAid at that point. There were libraries who were already embracing the NT-based hierarchical networks, but we weren't there yet.

* There WAS no wireless. Let me reiterate. There was no wi-fi anywhere, let alone in our libraries. Heck, cell phones were still more of a luxury than a requirement in Connecticut and beepers were the more populus solution to keeping in touch. They seemed revolutionary though, because you could easily carry them everywhere (they were small enough to be worn on your belt). I recall beeping my husband with the numerical code "143" (for "I love you" - character count in each word, get it? Everyone at once, now -- "Awww...." Did I mention we were newlyweds?) SMS? texting? Are you kidding me? I don't know if the technology was even available, but it certainly wasn't a part of our original cell phone plans and I had never heard of it in those days.

* Highspeed internet consisted of 56K Frame Relay setups that were very expensive but cutting-edge for our libraries, as I recall. Bandwidth was ALWAYS an issue.

* The annual Computers In Libraries conference was - if I recall correctly - more about the integrated library system and hardware components than about the internet. People kept saying that the future was the web, but we were all certain that the lack of bandwidth would bring everything to a grinding halt. The revolution in web technologies at the time was really taking hold in business (we were at the height of the dot com boom in the late 90s), though often it was difficult for us to convince libraries that non-mediated use of web browsers was a worthwhile service to provide for the public. Heck, they used to have rules to prevent the public from accessing their email on public computers. Some libraries went so far as to block sites like hotmail.com. Email, BTW, was usually considered to be a client software-based activity. The people who worked for our library network used a third-party website to hook into our email remotely from the libraries, but just to give you some perspective - there was no Gmail.

* The dot-com crash wouldn't begin until later in 2000. When it did occur, the naysayers who felt that the prospects of the web's long-term success were overstated said "I told you so".

* IM and IRC were already in practice - even a little old-school, but IM was mostly for those participating in the old AOL, or at least that was my impression. I'd used IRC even back in '94, when my sister was going to library school (not library information science school) in Pittsburgh. But for anyone who's still trying to get your colleagues to embrace IM, let them know that it's been a technology widely used by the public for a very long time.

* Rocket book ebook readers became popular among my coworkers, but there was a serious lack of content. As a result of the lack of popularity, many predicted that the overwrought ebooks trend was DOA.

* The cutting edge in devices was PDAs, particularly Palm Pilots... smart phones were just about to make their first appearance. I think I got my first one, which had a Microsoft OS & a mini-version of Word, Excel, etc., through TMobile, in 2002 or 2003.

* We were about to embark on a cutting edge virtual reference endeavor, which we began in 2001. Messaging a librarian online was a brand-new and highly controversial idea. A decade later, it's still controversial for some librarians.

* The "Systems librarian" wasn't really a fully-formed concept yet. We still believed that catalogers would automatically be the best people to run our libraries' technology. Library school programs - for the most part - didn't offer much in the way of systems training. It was as though you could tack on technology learning after the fact, after the degree. That it was a simple and easy set of skills to master - just memorization of processes and steps rather than a way of looking at the components of the technology and understanding how they relate and how they could be improved upon. As a result, librarians with any technology skills whatsoever were fewer and further between than they ought to have been. It helped my career, but it didn't do great things for our field.

Overall, there are so many lessons I've learned about my work in library systems in the past decade. But the one that stands out for me most - the one that's most worth passing on at this point - is that all technologies transform. There are many technologies that appear, gain a minor foothold, but because they are somehow in conflict with how people have previously envisioned the technology, are not immediately embraced. When they don't gain immediate populus acceptance, the naysayers point to this as proof that the idea itself is flawed and that the technology will never succeed. Ultimately, however, the kernel of what was good in that technology - the impulse that initially drove it forward - remains. A new way of getting at that kernel - a redo of the initial technological concept with better marketing, packaging, or techniques finally appears and at that point - the public having been primed to the concept already - it becomes popular and successful (example, the ebook is back and more successful than ever; its much-cited lack of sensory appeal be damned). So Second Lifers, don't despair- virtual worlds will reemerge, too. Will your Second Life real estate increase in value? Perhaps not. But somewhere, what is effective and compelling about the concept will reappear.

Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team

2009-12-09T16:51:00.005-05:00

Quick notes on a great book I picked up from my local public library (of course!) this weekend:
Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team

And in case you were wondering what those are:

Absence of Trust: Trust is the foundation. Members of the team have to allow themselves to be vulnerable to one another. That trust has to be built and maintained over time.
Fear of Conflict: The reason trust is the 1st dysfunction is that without it, teams cannot get over the fear of conflict. The type of conflict a team must be unafraid of are clear, open-eyed, passionate debates with one another over topics of the greatest importance to the team and to the organization. Conflict is inherently an uncomfortable situation, but it is often a necessary part of teamwork, but team members must have the courage to engage in it in order to ensure the best possible outcomes. It just has to be productive conflict, not destructive conflict. Destructive conflict is about politics, pride, sabotage, competition. Productive conflict is about the pursuit of truth -- of the best way forward. Without trust, the people involved in the conflict are more interested in winning the argument than finding a solution. They may not even have enough trust to have the conflict play out face-to-face, but may vent to others about the person they disagree with outside of the team meeting. This is destructive.
Lack of Commitment: Buy-in is important, but commitment is paramount. You don't have to have the team achieve consensus. Such a charge would lead to mediocrity, delay, etc. But you do have to have all team members be committed to the final decision, even if they passionately debated against it during meetings.In fact, commitment = "... the ability to defy a lack of consensus". Everyone on the team must be committed to - and clear about - the final decision. They must return to their colleagues/department & explain the decision publicly within twenty-four hours of the meeting. This requirement makes team members participate in the debate about the decision and commit to it more completely. (to take responsibility for it).
Avoidance of Accountability: a strong team includes peer-to-peer accountability. We hold fellow team members accountable. It does a colleague you trust, respect and are committed to working with, no good if you do not point out when they are off-track. Each team member has to step up to this task, no matter how uncomfortable. The leader sets the tone. They must be willing to confront difficult issues, even issues related to team members' behaviors, big and small. Meetings allow people to hold one another accountable.
Inattention to Results:

Really, it all comes down to this...

2009-11-24T12:01:00.002-05:00

People want more control over their technological environment.

Hence, frustrations with websites in general, vendor-run library systems, Facebook... It's all the same issue, just in different packages. People feel complete revulsion toward those who try to control them (hence the antipathy toward Microsoft). They feel positive toward those who get out of their way.

(and getting out of their way does not mean that you "guide" them or offer them a mandatory "smart filter" or in any other way manipulate them.)

People don't want to have to be confined to one little website/system, they want to pick and choose on the fly. Whatever works for them, that's what it's all about. It's not about loyalty to a specific website, service, or company. They'll as quickly go with a competitor as with you. The people can make your site or break it. So don't tee them off...

(see more outcry on the FB changes in the comments/replies to FB's blog posting about the change):

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=162536657130

one more hint to FB & anyone else out there - just admit when you're posting about the new changes those things that will be hard for people to adjust to. Don't make it sound like you're doing everyone a big favor when you're about to inconvenience a portion of your user base.