Sep 08 2 comments
Library Issues

website redesign and users (OMG! not the user!)

By amy


cc licensed flickr photo shared by ntr23

so at least two of us in the collective have recently gone live with new library websites (probably more, ’tis the time of year). as i was dealing with the fallout from this (and yes, i know, there will always be fallout – some of da peeples will never be happy, not never) i started wondering about the whole process of redesigning library websites.

what are we trying to accomplish with these redesigns? the answer is usually “to make things easier to find for our users”. but this is where it gets all kinds of sticky. libraries have _so_many_ different user groups. in my own library we have:

  • undergraduates
  • graduate students
  • researchers
  • professors
  • librarians (both chez nous and at other institutions)
  • continuing education students
  • students who speak neither English nor French
  • citizens of the city & province
  • and, oh ya, ANYONE WHO FINDS US THROUGH THE GOOGLEMACHINE!

what does this mean for library site design?
how many groups do we need to consult prior to making a big change?
do we then weight the opinions of certain groups more than others?
when doing the redesign, should we do it in-house, or outsource it to a company that can make it sleeker than your average web services librarian has time for?
should we be designing for the 800×600 IE6 group of folks out there, or should we use the redesign of the library site to teach them that the minimum standards have changed, and they should join us, the friendly library, in this new (upgraded) online world?
where’s the line between accessibility and ease of use? is there one? is it possible to have a site that meets accessibility standards, is mobile-ready, and isn’t nine kinds of fug?

so, who wants to take a stab at answering some of these questions?

Jun 24 2 comments
Emerging Technologies, Hardware, Innovation

What we can learn from Nike’s Persuasive Technology

By Mita Williams

The cover story of the latest issue of WIRED Magazine is dedicated to the success of the Nike+ sensor system. Nike+ allows users to track and share the time, speed, and distance of their runs using an iPod or Nike+ wristband. I can personally attest to the motivational power of such feedback. I ran fairly regularly when I used it but when my wristband sensor died, I used its untimely death as an excuse to stop running. (I’m waiting for a free replacement of a next gen model. The WIRED article fails to mention the high failure rate of the first batch of the  system’s technology.)

My friend who runs marathons doesn’t need a Nike+ system to help her keep track of her runs – shes uses a pen and paper. But I, like most people, find that just this extra bit of little work feels like a huge burden. Like Nike, libraries need to strive to create systems that feel as effortless as possible (just one example: writing down a 20 digit call number isn’t hard but it feels hard).

I think there are other things we can distill from the Nike+ experience. Its worth noting how rich an experience Nike+ is able to generate for its 1.2 million users with just three data points.  We should consider what information we could capture to help motivate our students. Privacy advocates tells us that no one likes to be watched but that’s not exactly the case. “The gist of the idea is that people change their behavior – often for the better – when they are being observed (which is why it’s sometimes called the observer effect).”

Visual feedback helps reinforce positive behaviour. From the above WIRED article, “a 2001 study in the American Journal of Health Behavior showed that personalized feedback increased the effectiveness of everything from smoking-cessation to interventions for problem drinkers to exercise programs.” The Prius dashboard encourages better driving for high fuel efficiency. Recently there’s been some folks creating library dashboards but they haven’t been developed yet to provide individual user feedback of their borrowing or reading habits.

Video game designers are masters at presenting user data and creating rewards for user behaviour and Jane McGonigal thinks we can use what they’ve learned to improve our happiness and our future in the real world. In her IGDA Education Keynote 2009, McGonigal makes a number of book recommendations including Persuasive Technology by B. J. Fogg (2003) in order to learn more about the ramifications of using computers to try to change user behaviour. I’ve got the book on my lap right now at a page in which Fogg describes a hypothetical library-related example of persuasive technology:

Because she’s serious about school, Pamela runs an application on her device called Study Buddy. Here’s what the application does: As Pamela begins her evening study session, she launches the Study Buddy system and views the display. Study Buddy congratulates her for studying for the third time that day, meeting the goal she set at the beginning of the academic quarter. The device suggests that Pamela start her study session with a five-minute review of her biology vocabulary words, then read two chapters assigned for tomorrow’s sociology lecture. As Pamela reviews biology, the Study Buddy screen shows a cluster of shapes, which represents her classmates who are currently studying. This motivates her to continue studying.

Later that evening, as Pamela wraps up her work, she’s curious about her mentor, Jean so she turns to Study Buddy for information. Jean also subscribes to the Study Buddy system and has invited Pamela into her “awareness group” (1). Pamela sees a symbol on the display that indicates that Jean in currently in one of the campus libraries. Jean is a good role model; she’s a senior who was recently admitted to a top graduate school. Being a study mentor means that Jean has agreed to let Pamela remotely view Jean’s studying habits. Using Study Buddy, Jean can send simple sounds and tactile cues such as vibration patterns to Pamela to encourage her to study.

I should note that I haven’t actually read the rest of this book. I’m hoping by posting writing about it I’ll shame motivate myself to do so.

Jun 09 7 comments
Innovation

Innovation and Technolust

By Andy Burkhardt

Today I attended a conference called Leadership in a Connected Age. This conference gave me a lot of things to think about, but two points very relevant to this blog had to do with innovation and technolust.

In our manifesto post by Rochelle, she talked about how innovating is hard. It is also necessary. Without innovation, companies, or in our case libraries, stagnate. It doesn’t take long before organizations that refuse to innovate, or innovate very slowly, become irrelevant. Libraries right now are innovating. People are doing a lot of cool things with Social OPACs, Social Media, video, customization, etc. But we could still be doing better. Not everyone is on board for some of these innovations and changes.

The main obstacle to innovation is fear. This is the fear of change but also the fear of failure. Yet, neither of these should be that scary. Change is inevitable. Heraclitus said, “Nothing endures but change”. The moon waxes and wanes and the tides rise and fall. Nothing stays the same, so we should be used to it by now. And failure is a good thing. Failure is what gives rise to innovation. Edison said when inventing the light bulb, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

So change and failure can be scary but we need to overcome them and see them for what they really are: tools for improvement.

That brings me to technolust. I, like most of my colleagues on this blog, have been known to exhibit the telltale symptoms of technolust: drooling at new handheld devices, ogling netbooks, irrational impatience for Google Wave. Yet also like many of my colleagues, I realize that the new shiny tech can’t be the driver in whatever you’re doing.

Sure, maybe it is the right move to set up some new social media service for your library, but why? You have to ask the “why” first. In fact, first you have to step back and ask what is it I want to accomplish, or where do I want the library to be in 18 months? Once you have this vision, the fun tech stuff will fall into place. It will be that much easier to sell your ideas to your boss or colleagues, especially if they may be a bit wary about these changes.

For more about some of these ideas check out Steve Shepard’s articles. I would recommend the one on Reverse Engineering the Future. He was one of the keynote speakers today and definitely has some great ideas about innovation and making your vision a reality.

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May 28 2 comments
Random

Memed Digital

By Rochelle

Since the start, I’ve taken issue with the “digital immigrants/digital natives” divide. From one angle, that division puts me and everyone I share my digital life with on the digital immigrants side, in spite of our very rich online lives. From another, it suggests that the undergraduate students I spend my days assisting are somehow “wired differently” than me, and are way more adept at technology than me. This just isn’t my experience in any way. I think it denigrates the amazing work of older net citizens and puts teens in a box in which they do not identify in any way shape or form. The generational argument just falls flat to me.

Listening to Don Tapscott’s recent Big Ideas lecture the other day gave me a new insight on the matter. Like all who advocate the idea of a digital generational shift, Tapscott was inspired by watching his kids. They’re geniuses! No wait, all their friends are geniuses too! This is the beginning of the problem; anecdotes are great, but they bias you in a particular way. In Tapscott’s world, it’s the kids who are living the digital life, not his peers. Therefore, it must be generational. There is nothing in his evidence that proves this; in fact, even the brain chemistry evidence he cites doesn’t prove it. Different behaviours, different activities can change brain chemistry; that’s not news. That’s the real story, not generations.

Different behaviours and activities can be more popular with certain age groups than others, which makes this “digital native” thing an issue of correlation, not causation. However: do we have evidence that more teenagers are interested in the digital life than any other generation? Gen X is small compared to the “millenials”, correct? In 1994 Wired predicted that by the year 2000 the average age of internet users would be 15. Then I wonder why, in 2008, the average age of internet users in the UK is 37.9? As of right now, NiteCo lists the average age of internet users as 28.3421. I’m not suggesting that teens aren’t interested in the internet and in digital life; it’s just that it’s not primarily or only them. It’s not a factor of their age. This isn’t even like Elvis, when the kids loved the rock’n'roll and the adults hated it; it’s nowhere near that clear cut.

I think it’s more like a cultural meme. It’s a series of metaphors, of truths we accept. In the digital culture meme, there can be something called “digital culture”. An online community is a real community. You can have online friends, and they’re real friends. You can “talk” online using only text, and have it mean as much to you as a face to face conversation. You’re intrigued by new internet apps, not scared. You have a tendency to play with things digital and see how they fit into, or alter, your digital life. The idea of wanting to be connected pretty much all the time is not that strange or dangerous; “thinking with the internet” is a concept that makes sense to you. These ideas, among many others, make up the digital culture meme, and the people who subscribe to it are the digital natives. It has nothing to do with when and where you were born.

Maybe it’s like Stravinsky. When they first performed Rite of Spring, people rioted. It was so foreign, no one knew how to respond to it. But eventually, the meme of radical music spread; eventually, the song made it into Disney’s Fantasia. It wasn’t worthy of a riot anymore; it wasn’t different anymore. It wasn’t going to destroy society. It was just a new way of thinking. Did that start with a generation? Or just a group of classical music lovers? We didn’t consider that a generational shift, but perhaps it was. New ways of thinking, new ways to intrepret culture.

Or are we trapped by old ideas about genetics? Old ideas, the ideas that filter through into society as truths. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks; real change comes from the youth. Is that so? For people like Don Tapscott, is thinking of the digital culture meme as a generational change a way to excuse himself, and his peers, and others who fear the meme, from participating? Is it reassuring to think of digital culture as something akin to built-into-your-genes and unfixable? They are just built differently, they’re brains are different; don’t feel challenged by these new ways of thinking and communicating. Don’t feel threatened. It’s not your fault that you don’t understand or won’t participate. That’s what’s right given your brain wiring. This is only a game for the young. This is the way THEY think, because they were born in this world. But no, it’s not like genetics in that sense; it’s more like epigenetics. Your brain is flexible, your genes are flexible depending on the choices you make, the options you have, and the circumstances you’re in. Accepting the meme and living digital can change your brain. It has nothing to do with your age.

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May 26 1 comments
Emerging Technologies

My new fave search engine is Zotero

By Mita Williams

While Zotero – “the free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources” – isn’t exactly new, the program recently made the jump from 1.0 to 2.0 (beta) and with in doing so, has become social software and something more: it’s becoming a favourite search engine of mine.

But let me back it up a bit so I can say a little bit about custom or personalized search engines. I think they’re great and I wish more people would find them so they could enjoy their greatness too.

For example, I use LISZEN to search the library blogosphere and search my own homemade Google Custom Search Engine of OCUL libraries whenever I wonder if someone up the highway has some insight on the matter at hand. The University of Winnipeg uses a Custom Google Search Engine for its Canadian Art Library Guide, which I think is a brilliant application and breathes new life into the traditional library subject guide. And at one time, I entertained the notion that libraries could use Google Custom Search Engines as an alternative to the proprietary indexes that we offer, but after trying out The Economics Search Engine of 23 000 economics web sites  its pretty clear that this technology doesn’t scale. That’s too bad because I think we need a prominent index of the open access journal content out there.

OK. Back to Zotero.

I had waited to try out Zotero properly only after Zotero turned 2.0 because I was waiting for its automatic backup and synch features. And in the last handful of weeks, I’ve been slowly adding material into my Zotero library as a way to get a feel for the software. And then it just today that I realized that Zotero was indexing not just the metadata of the websites and journal articles I was planting into it – it was indexing the fulltext of the saved snapshots as well as and the text in the saved pdfs.

So, I plunked in the annual literature reviews dedicated to Library Instruction and Information Literacy from Reference Services Review and voila! I had myself my own little Information Literacy Research Index in my browser!

If you haven’t tried out Zotero yet, I wholeheartedly encourage you to do so. Zotero has some big plans they are working on including a partnership with the Internet Archive. That’s the project that really intrigues me. Not only will scholars be able to add material from the Internet Archive into their personal Zotero libraries but they will also be able to contribute their own digital work contributions into its commons.

When I think I of the future of libraries, I can’t help but think our future dovetailing into Zotero somehow.

May 24 12 comments
Emerging Technologies

Do you Poken? (Or have business cards gone the way of the dodo?) #techuncamp

By Lisa

A few weeks ago, I went to my first library-related conference, the Tech Camp unConference that was held at Michigan State. I was coerced by Heidi to join her and other peeps from WSU (and beyond) for a day long conference on all things library related tech stuff and it also happened to be FREE so I was sold. Since I agreed more or less at the last minute, I was a bit at a loss as to what to bring with me, so I of course asked Heidi who clued me in. One of the things I should bring, she said, was business cards although they were not totally necessary as this was a casual ‘do. But one never knows and one should be prepared for any eventuality.

Since my lib school orientation this past August, one thing that had been drilled by then current students and alum were business cards: Many students were hitting conferences before starting school, others were working in libraries or in information organizations or just plain networking at social events and the like. On my global to-do list, getting business cards has been hovering at the top for months now as I either keep forgetting or am too lazy to order them. Now two days before the conference, I had to whip some up together and thus, at the last minute bought business card stock and color ink and spent an hour or two designing business cards to print from home the night before. Satisfied with my handy work, I printed about 30 or so cards and neatly stacked them in my wallet.

Except — I shouldn’t have bothered. Since the entire conference was Twittering, I was connected to nearly everyone at the conference within an hour. And that’s how social networking works, in a nutshell: You find X person at one social networking site and you are almost literally connected to their entire world. Thank $deity I brought my laptop with me because not only was I adding new peeps to my follower list but also adding them via various other sites as well. Who needs business cards when you have the interwebs?

A few days later, a follow librarian tweeple twittered about Poken – essentially a tiny USB flash drive that is configured to hold all of your social network info in one spot. No more hunting and pecking through various sites, Poken is essentially your business card and connector in one easy to use application.

For someone like me, who is on every major social network, this is brilliant as I may be @pnkrcklibrarian on Twitter, but I’m academichussy on LiveJournal or modgirl on Last.Fm. I have have different user names on various sites depending on what nom de plume I was using at the time I signed up. And if you just met me, you wouldn’t, obviously, know that. But with Poken, and using various privacy settings depending on whom I’m meeting, all that guesswork is taken away.

As conferencing is looking to be more likely in the future, I will eventually order Moo cards for my business card needs, but I’ll also will have a Poken with me as well. But I’m hoping, no betting, that Poken-ing (or something similiar) will become the new de facto way of
giving people information about me, because portals are so 1999.

P.S. I once did a presentation for a small group on Jane Austen and the use of tea as a social construct in Georgian times and one thing that surprised me during my research was the use of calling cards, which were in fashion during her life time (late 18th and early 19th centuries) and had been around for quite some time before that. Calling cards are also apparently making a come-back of sorts and while I don’t think the concept is ever going to go away, the new technology will definitely improve how we convey social introductions to each other. Everying old is apparently new again.

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May 24 1 comments
Random

Podcast theme, attempt 1

By Rochelle

Thanks to this guy for the music, orator for the voices, and garageband for making the mixing possible.

May 24 3 comments
Random

The Tech-Ink Manifesto

By Rochelle

[Dear Tech-Inkers: below is a manifesto I have written to define what this blog is for. Please feel free to edit or add to it to reflect the direction you feel it should go, or to ensure that it's properly conveying your circumstances or interests. It will be a far more interesting place if I'm not the only one to define it: don't be shy! Edit away!]

Internet technology and new media move fast; libraries generally move slowly. As librarians, it’s easy for us to get comfortable and do what’s required of us and nothing more, particularly in a world where library patron satisfaction is based on how friendly we are and not on how accurate, or innovative, or trend-setting we are. It’s easy not to be innovative; innovation scares people. Change makes people uncomfortable. Introducing new ideas translates into more work, more thinking, more feeling insecure at not being on top of all this change, or not being in the loop. It’s easier, more comfortable, and more popular to just do what’s expected. To just keep digging one particular ditch without looking up.

This blog is about looking up. We don’t want to dig the same ditch for the rest of our lives. We are curious and thoughtful people interested in the way communication is changing. We like the way the world is turning authority on its ear and opening up publishing platforms to anyone and everyone. We like what this means in terms of our old ways of talking about legitimacy and information literacy. We like the new genres and forms of communication that are being generated all around us. We like the challenges that are being made to old ideas like copyright, distribution, sharing, and authorship. We are intrigued that currently available information is taking on new meaning, new power and new potential as it gets mashed together via new media with geographic data, contributed text, and images. We are keen to be part of the conversation around these things. We have much to offer and learn.

We want to discuss how new media impacts us, our patrons, and the information around us; we want to move toward new media with wide open eyes and helping hands. We want to be actors and partipicants, movers and shakers, not just witnesses. We need to come out from behind the desk. The internet needs us as much as we need it. It needs us to evaluate it, find ways to apply it, make it valuable, give it a niche if it deserves one. We need new media to help us to change the way we think about old problems and methods; it is one of our catalysts toward innovation.

The purpose of this blog is to create a venue for this kind of discussion. Not all librarians share our interest in the impact of new media and the internet on our profession, our patrons, and ourselves; this is a place where we can share our discoveries, our enthusiasm, our questions and musings, or our disappointments with like-minded souls. It is a place to record what we learn and build on each other’s experiences. It is a place where we can challenge each other and ourselves.

While in-depth considerations of serious and academic new applications is welcome and likely, so is random, joyous play with applications that appear to have no intention of improving the minds of anyone. (Most of the best applications we have we never meant to be anything but fun.) Play is a crucial part of learning, and if we jettison things to fast because they aren’t “serious” enough, we risk avoiding any innovation or valuable learning altogether. Fun things have more potential for social change than boring things. Fun things tap into parts of ourselves that we tend not to invoke when we put on our serious learning faces; those things might be the key to our ability to learn deeply.

This blog is the place where we will spill virtual ink about being virtual; the hardware that gets us there, the software that guides us, the communities that people create and develop, the information they generate, and the ways these things change (or have the potential to change) our library environments.

We hope you’ll join us!

May 24 4 comments
Library School

When the MLIS student is 2.0 and the school is not.

By Lisa

First off, I have to warn you, I’m verbose. The fact that I am fairly active on Twitter is astounding because I’ve had to start thinking in 140 characters instead of word counts and condensed my most precious thoughts into succinct, minute statements of clarity. But I am fairly entertaining, so there is that bit. You can blame the verbosity on a variety of factors like I’m Canadian1, a girl or just simply that I have a undergrad degree in English Lit. Or any of the combination above will work.

I’m not a librarian — yet. I am a librarian in progress as I’ve just finished up my first year of my MLIS degree at Wayne State University where recently we’ve gone from being a “LISP” to a “SLIS.” I feel like with that move, we should lobby for an entry at Stuff White People Like. Not only am I doing the straight MLIS degree, but I’m doing dual certification in archives AND information management. What does this mean? Longer in school, more student loans2 (on top of my existing loans from my BA and MA), with the sliver of a chance of getting better jobs when I graduate next year sometime. My concentration, self-designed more or less, is digital archives and libraries, with a very heavy emphasis on emerging tech.

The story of how I fell into librarianship is long and winded, and I know this as I’ve written it 1093813 times for SOP’s for grad school applications, scholarship essays and spoken of it many a time when queried by people. So I won’t bore you with that, but what is relevant is that I come from a very heavy tech background and for some reason, this makes me special.

Back in the ye olden days of the internets, aka late ’90s and early ’00s, I worked for a variety of firms in a variety of capacities with my last big girl job as a senior network engineer for a tier 1 ISP. In fact, I worked for one of the world’s largest ISP who owned or managed about 70% of the bandwidth that exists on the Internet. That company was UU.Net and has been absorbed by so many goliath corporations that I believe the official entity no longer exists and exists now in name only for branding purposes, but I could be wrong. What I did at UU was playing around on large scale routers, doing turnups for business customers for as small circuits as 56k up to OC3. GigE was just getting into play when I left and I also had big crush on BGP.

And I’ve been a geek, for many many years — long before these web2.0 hussies came in with their Macbooks, “web design skillz” and pink cell phones. There is a heavy distinction, I think, within the geek community and this has become a pet peeve of mine with these web2.0 hussies out touting themselves as “geeks” and OMG, LULZ, aren’t I just adorable line of crap. Right, I’m ranting, not the point.

So! Lisa is now in library school and behold! Look at all of the awesome things libraries are doing and holy cow, some of them are on the bleeding freakin’ edge! So clearly, while I’ve made many a stupid decision in my life, clearly going to library school is not one of them.

Except, except.. the school in which our vaguely young heroine is going to is technologically challenged! Not stone age abacus challenged, but still technically challenged just the same.

There are a couple of problems with this:
1. I’ve found that in the library world, there are two typs of MLIS schools: practical and theory. The practical school is like mine in which you go in, do the work get your degree and move on. The theory schools are the ones that tend to do some of the practical work but also do research, so a lot of the cool stuff starts coming out of the theory school. Some have even gone away from traditional librarianship roles and have become information specialists. Bottom line: There seems to be very few schools who do a combination of both, and mine is starting to come to that methodology but it is not fully realized yet.
2. One of my professors is fond of saying that librarians were last on the tech wagon when in fact we should have been the damned conductors. So the field is now struggling with information overload as we start to grasp the realities of what we missed out on. But on the flipside, there is amazing amount of stuff being done by librarians so we’re definitely making up for lost time.
3. A lot of the practical schools, mine in particular, are not equipped to handle tech-centric students (like myself) who could teach most if not all of the tech courses. Not everyone wants to be a school media specialist nor a public librarian! Stop trying to pigeonhole me into those roles!
4. A lot of students are not aware or being made aware of the limitless possibilities of librarianship and all the cool things going out there. I personally get warm fuzzies just thinking about it. I’ve been on some mailing lists where people are begging about new blogs, wikis, and the like to read of other like-minded individuals only to never be answered with where to go,who to prod or the like. I glom myself to anyone who answers me or speaks to me on this stuff because they are just one more chain in my network I can explore.
5. The librarian v. tech geeks pissing contest needs to stop. This is not freakin’ Tekken! It’s not a matter of to the death of one or the other — there is a lot of similar background, common interests and future plans between the two that there could be a lot of harmonious, sweet lovin’ action going on and no, there isn’t. There needs to be a bridge, other peeps like me, that can talk to both groups and help develop a common language.
6. Google is not an evil rat bastard. ‘Nuff said. I get so bloody tired of hearing that argument.

I could go on, but this may end up as a novella and I think you get the point.
The solution: I think that’s what this blog will be for me, a solution to work out how to do what I want to do with the tools that I have available at my stead. I’ve got a lot of really cool projects coming up with variety of up and coming technologies for class, personal and professional work. And the people writing here are amazing, I’m terribly excited to be here.


1. I am actually a Canadian-American or American-Canadian! I have dual citizenship.
2. I’m a newly minted grad assistant, so the university is now paying for my tuition. But I will be dodging the student loan dude, I’m sure, when I graduate. Or maybe I’ll go for my PhD?

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May 23 1 comments
Random

ETIG library camp – still time to register!

By amy

i had initially planned my first post to be a bit more of a “why i love tech” type thing, but there is something more pressing i wanted to mention first. then, as i thought about it, talking about the library camp for ETIG is definitely “why i love tech”.

the ETIG preconference for CLA is not, in fact, cancelled, it has just gone “off the grid”.

if you are interested in attending, sign up on the wiki and bring your A game. we’re going to talk about all kinds of tech-related issues affecting libraries these days. oh, and Montreal, is a pretty fun town.

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