CIL 2008 Wrapup

So there was a lot of buzz at this year’s Computers in Libraries. Unlike last year, it wasn’t all about Twitter, though many of us were twittering away throughout the conference. And granted, I could only attend Monday and Tuesday, so perhaps I missed out on what the hot trends were…

The theme was “InnovativeChange: Integrating High Tech With High Touch”. (Hey wait a second, I missed half the conference – I didn’t notice the “high touch” aspect… except for the reference by the “rock stars” – the Shanachie boys – to “library spin the bottle”. But that’s a whole other story & nothing to do with this very professional blog posting.)

Trends I noticed were user-generated content, creation of videos and screencasts (e.g., for YouTube), embracing Lib2.0/Web2.0 philosophy (there’s the innovation piece). These topics were accompanied by the usual nuts and bolts tools to help us improve our websites and catalogs (not to mention to amuse ourselves with!).

There was also a lot of talk about using open source solutions for everything from ILS to website content management. Open source has come of age in libraries – it’s truly an alternative these days, and it doesn’t necessarily require a team of IT gurus to implement (yes, you have to be somewhat tech literate, but on the scale of difficulty, using open source today just doesn’t rate that highly).

On the philosophical front, there was a whole track on innovation this year – fostering and supporting it in libraries. And in the “Woepac to Wowpac” session, alongside the tools and how to ideas, such as implementing LibraryThing For Libraries (nicely presented by Connecticut’s own Kate Sheehan - http://loosecannonlibrarian.net/ - formerly of Danbury Public Library, now of Darien Library), John Blyberg (also one of our Connecticut colleagues from Darien Library) challenged the audience with a higher-level discussion focusing on analysis and rebuilding systems completely, as needed, to get a more holistic approach in providing online services. I know I’m not doing his words and points justice, so let me point you to his blog - http://www.blyberg.net/ - where he regularly posts his innovative thinking on the provision of library services. He even offered up what turned out to be my favorite quotable phrase from the conference – “the succubus of the committee”.

And BTW, in my opinion, he’s absolutely and utterly correct. Putting a pretty face on a lousy ILS doesn’t get us where our patrons need us to be. Separating our website and catalog efforts reflects a massive failure to understand the situation – the catalog and the website may be separate systems at this point, but the underlying truth is that they are aspects of providing online services to patrons that should be integrated. Why – in some libraries - is a tech services person, with their cataloging expertise, but lack of user interface experience, in charge of the OPAC and the webmaster completely out of the loop? We need both people working together. Yet things can be so divorces in today's libraries that the webmaster may not even be apprised of major OPAC changes until after the fact. It makes no sense. Let the web professional do their job & have them be involved enough to get the OPAC in harmony with the website. In some cases, the webmaster comes from a library systems background, but due to the artificial divisions that place the ILS in one conceptual box and the website in another, we are unable to effectively integrate these aspects of our web presence. The outside world doesn’t care who runs what or why these things are so awkwardly cobbled together, why some data is not available in our catalogs, etc., they just want online library services that make sense. They want the website and catalog to work together seamlessly so they can be successful in doing their online library-related tasks. It’s really that simple, folks!

What’s Hot In Libraries

One thing I noticed was that the cool kids are all in the LSW (password notala) - see http://librarysociety.pbwiki.com/. So it seems that Meebo - http://www.meebo.com/ - is a must-have and those of us who haven’t Meebo’ed are a little behind. And the boys from Delft, Netherlands and their ShanachieTour - http://www.shanachietour.com/ - were definitely still the rock stars. To explain, the Delft Public Library has a video creation lab, among other innovative features in their library. Three of the innovative librarians within the library decided to take their videography & sound equipment over to the US and embark on a cross-country tour wherein they talked with innovative librarians about their efforts. They mixed in great music and voila – a sensation was born – the rock stars of the library world! They were keynote speakers for Tuesday and really got us all motivated for the coming sessions and for – ultimately – a return to our own libraries where we can implement the many great ideas we got from CIL!

To get more information on the CIL2008 presentations, try the following (including postings of presentation slides):

http://www.infotodayblog.com/

http://cil2008.pbwiki.com/

http://www.slideshare.net/tag/cil2008

And for those of you into RSS, try the superfeed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/Cil2008Superfeed (add this url to your feeds in bloglines, for example)

User-Generated Content Session, Roy Tennant

For a very nicely done wrapup of this CIL session, see http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/2008/04/cil2008-user-generated-content-and-more.html. The piece that I wanted to remind myself and my readers to take a look at are some projects that are taking advantage of user-generated, community content. Perhaps the most interesting one to me, one that actualizes an idea that I’ve had floating around in my brain for awhile for my state’s citizens who have a lot personal history & genealogy they might like to store and share online with our help is KETE – see http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz/ from New Zealand. The system to do this project, which allows citizens to post information, such as personal photos, and helps them to create family trees (wouldn’t that be nice) – is open-source, developed by the folks who developed famous open source ILS KOHA – see more at http://kete.net.nz/. He also mentioned the Library of Congress on Flickr (see my post 2 posts ago), a project by Boston Public Library and a research project using community tagging of images from museums, called Steve.Museum – see http://www.steve.museum/.

Fast & Easy Site Tuneups Session

Jeff Wisniewski’s presentation was apropos and exciting for me, because it talked about theoretically quick fixes to make your website better. I like his philosophy of iterative improvement of your site because – as he pointed out so well – the full redesign process that so many libraries engage in can take a long time and cause considerable disruption along the way.

He reminded us that it would be a good idea to create an external script- such as a javascript that pulls the current year into the copyright statement. He also suggested that we do more with our “contacts”, including adding photos to contact information to give the library and face and using microformats to make our contact info more usable. Look at the Dreamweaver Microformats extension - http://www.webstandards.org/action/dwtf/microformats/ & review hCard creator - http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator. He talked about the use fo Firefox extensions, such as Tails - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2240 - and Operator - http://labs.mozilla.com/2006/12/introducing-operator/ - to read microformats within web pages.

Jeff suggested harnessing the “awesome power of the 3 question survey”. One example would be: (1) what was the purpose of your visit to our website today? (2) were you able to complete your task today? (3) if not, why not? You could use SurveyMonkey or similar product to tally results.

He also spoke about “scanhostile” (a new word he coined) phrasing, such as “click here” for hyperlinks. He suggested use of the global find & replace function to seek out instances of the dreaded “click here”.

On the style front, he suggested you try automatic creation of a friendly Web2.0 type logo through a site like Web2.0 Stylr. Characteristics of Web2.0 graphics include: (1) small chunks of large sans serif type; (2) cheery colors; (3) rounded edges. Try Web2.0 Stylr - http://web2.0stylr.com/stylr.aspx. He also suggested we add more graphical information, such as common icons to our site. To get them for free, try http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Clear where there are freely downloadable, high-resolution (.png format) icons. And remove items out of the “blindness zone” on your webpage. For example, there is the dreaded “banner blindness”, in which web users have become so accustomed to advertising appearing across the top their eyes skip to lower down on the page.

To reduce load on your web server add the trailing slash to all hyperlinks to subdirectories (e.g., in my case, turn something like http://www.cslib.org/agencies to http://www.cslib.org/agencies/).

To increase the speed that your pages load, you can first test slowness. One tool is YSlow (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/), a Firefox extension (requires preinstallation of the Firebug extension - http://www.getfirebug.com/ ). Tidy your pages using the html validator at W3C - http://validator.w3.org/ - click on the “More Options” & check the box next to “Clean up Markup with HTML Tidy”.

Take advantage of better caching to increase the speed your pages load. On the server side, you can modify file caching & cache expiration by file extension – e.g., increase caching of images. If you have many small images it = many http requests, which can slow things down, so consider turned small images into 1 larger image. Eliminating inline scripts & styles increases the speed of all pages on your site – EXCEPT your home page. This is per Yahoo’s research. In your home page, have inline scripts, but throughout the rest of your site, do not – use external scripting. He showed results of a test using www.websiteoptimization.com that proved this. Also, check for & clean up bloated CSS.

For Search Engine Optimization, he reminded anyone not already using Google Webmaster Tools to take advantage of them. He used them to run a diagnostic on title tags. Poor page titling reduces search engine findability of pages. Use a global find & replace, if needed, to address page titling problems. The ideal pattern for a page title is: Document Title: Section Name: Library Site Name.

To improve accessibility and usability, add labels to your forms and use the right type of form field. Labeling form fields has the added benefit of – when applied to checkboxes – making even clicking around the field – on the label – add the check into the box (so if you have users with mousing issues, this will make the checkboxes function better for them). Be aware that radio buttons are to be used for mutually exclusive options and checkboxes for those times when the user would want to make 1 or more choices.

Finally, make your site social media-friendly. For example, create an easy way to add bookmarks to all pages, such as a quick snippet of javascript (I think the site he suggested to create the bookmark this page script snippet was http://www.addtobookmarks.com/).

CIL2008: Monday - a Few Notes from the Web Design Track

There are plenty of other bloggers out there covering Computers In Libraries 2008, often better than I can – so I’ll try to synthesize my day and some of the cool sites / tools I learned about in fewer words than usual.

1. Keynote – Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American Life Project -- http://www.pewinternet.org.... In which Lee explains that our biggest fans are the up and coming Gen Y folks. News of the library’s untimely demise is greatly exaggerated, per these recent findings. My spin? The Library2.0 movement is yielding good results and turning things around. The next generation is getting more positive experiences with their libraries these days - they realize that we're changing.
   
2. Web2.0: Services for Smaller, Underfunded Libraries, Sarah Houghton-Jan (www.librarianinblack.net), the Sr. Librarian for Digital Futures, San Jose Public Library – Presentation available in PDF format at http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/files/CIL2008-SmallLibraries.pdf. OK, San Jose doesn’t seem small or underfunded to a tiny town library that has only 1 professional on staff, but Sarah offered a good presentation covering the basics of using Web2.0 to enhance a library's web presence. You know: use blogs, flickr, rss feeds, wikis, etc. Highlights for me: a reminder to lobby administrators to realize that they get the greatest ROI from ebranches – i.e., their web presence - so they should do everything to support building and improvement of web presence; ways not to pay for images (http://www.classroomclipart.com, openclipart.org, openphoto.net, etc., see the presentation for full listing); providing audio & video content and turning said content to text automatically for multiple delivery methods; use RSS Calendar for a calendar of events that puts out an RSS feed; a push to be present on social networks. There was much more here, though all of it fairly basic to the Library2.0 crowd. If you’re just embarking on Library2.0 endeavors, I highly recommend you download the PDF of this presentation.
3. Fast & Easy Site Tune-Ups, by Jeff Wisniewski, Web Services Librarian, Univ. of Pittsburgh. This one was the most useful of the day’s sessions for me, so I’ll do a separate entry for this one. Suffice it to say, a lot of ideas for me to actually implement to improve our site and its functionality. Jeff promised his presentation would be up on the CIL2008 website (probably in about a week) – see http://www.infotoday.com/CIL2008/ or the CIL2008 wiki - http://cil2008.pbwiki.com/
4. During lunchtime, I went into the Exhibitor Hall and heard about the Library of Congress project that put over 3,000 photos on Flickr. Exciting stuff. Take a look at http://www.flickr.com/photos/Library_of_Congress & http://www.flickr.com/commons
5. Library Web Presence: Engaging the Audience, by Ellysa Stern Cahoy & Emily Rimland, Information Literacy Librarians and Binky Lush, Web Developer, Penn State University; Kristina DeVoe, English & Communications Librarian & Derik Badman, Digital Serivces Librarian, Temple University Libraries. I’m afraid I have to admit to coming in a little late on this one due to lunch. Also, I don’t have time to synthesize my thoughts on this one, so I’ll just give you my raw notes:

• Page built around Widgets -Penn State University – including IM - Ask Librarian; iGoogle to create personalized research desktop
• Widgetbox to create/code your widgets - http://www.widgetbox.com/
• Subject Guides 2.0
• LibGuides by SpringShare - http://www.springshare.com/libguides/index.html
• Temple example - http://guides.temple.edu
• Useful in many ways – modular, RSS feeds
• Still need to market the subject guides, though
• Other options similar to LibGuides (which is a premium service) at Code4Lib Journal, 2 (2008) – for more on this, see http://madinkbeard.com/library

Hello from Arlington - CIL2008

Hello from Arlington. After 3 months of recovering from the broken wrist, I started back at work full-time last week. Today and tomorrow, I’m attending the fabulous annual Computers In Libraries conference. Geez, what a way to start back – can you say overwhelming? Well, if you’re gonna start back at work again, may as well hit the ground running. This conference is an absolute wealth of ideas. It’s an event where you rub shoulders with people from an array of institutions, large and small, thought leaders and folks desperately playing catch up – but regardless of who you meet here, the common theme is that we’re all seeking to become more innovative in the ways we use technology to serve our organizations’ respective missions.

If you’re following the conference from afar, there are a number of folks blogging in real-time, or something near to it. Take a look at Technorati – blog, photos, and other entries labeled “cil2008” or “cil08” – and you’ll be able to glean lots of great nuggets from the sessions.

http://www.technorati.com/search/cil2008?authority=a4&language=en

I’ll be posting on my track later today, but needing to pay attention now, let’s just say that others are a little quicker and more effective on the draw.