On a Simpler Future for Library Websites

April 4, 2011 //

An interesting post from Aaron Schmidt at Walking Paper on the merits of simplified library web sites.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, a daring pilot and talented author, also weighed in on user experience:

“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.”

In some ways, libraries have been taking the opposite approach. We’ve gotten in the habit of tacking on new services and taking on new responsibilities, and many library websites can be seen as piecemeal collections of patron engagement tactics…

There are two ways to increase the amount of attention the bits of a website receive: either by increasing staffing and funding, or reducing the number of bits. An extreme example: imagine if your web team was only responsible for the page consisting of your library’s contact information, location, and one book recommendation per week. They’d be able to spend plenty of time on this page, testing, experimenting, and revising regularly. It would be a great page.

For years, I’ve heard talk about libraries cutting the cord on irrelevant services. Yet I haven’t heard as much discussion about which sacred web cows we can put out to pasture. This might in part be owing to the perception that a 200-page website isn’t more expensive to manage than a 50-page one. While probably true in terms of hosting fees, it isn’t otherwise true. Good content takes staff time to produce and arrange, and the navigational overhead can be a time expenditure for users.

I’m not suggesting that libraries shouldn’t try new things or add content to their sites. They should. Still, the library world needs to start a dialog about an additional way to prevent stagnation: subtraction.[read the full post]

People following this blog know my affection for minimalism as a creative conceit. Apart from aesthetics, I really believe there’s merit to simplifying library online experiences (something I’ve argued for in the past).

Schmidt takes aim at the current library web-design ethos of trying to stake as much online territory as possible. But, enthusiasm and ambition can be a downfall. There are many library landing pages with so many content and navigation options that it’s difficult to really find specific things. Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories Academic Libraries, Library Minimalism, Public Libraries, Technology, User experience, web tools

Library SoundTrack Fridays! Caribou and Holy Ghost

April 1, 2011 //

Holy Ghost pause for a photo

Library SoundTrack Friday is here, and it’s time for some indie-pop-electronica!

Hello, Holy Ghost! These guys are making some seriously fun retro-electro-pop that, incidentally, I’ll be seeing soon (backing up Cut Copy!).


If 1984 calls, tell them thanks.

I’ve listened to Caribou a lot this week. It’s a good mix for the office: upbeat, soothing, a generally rich tapestry of sounds. “Jamelia” is the closer to his fantastic and justifiably well received album, Swim.

Oh, and in tribute to the “last” concert of their “last” tour, here’s my fav LCD Soundsystem track.

Have a great weekend!

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Categories Library Soundtrack

Licence Culture Wars! What the Long Haul with Harper Collins Looks Like

March 31, 2011 //

by Kaetlyn Wilcox (pic links to her blog)

The Library Journal recently posted a run-down of how libraries have responded to Harper Collins’ eBook policy. Here’s one example:

The Kansas State Library decided this month to suspend adding any HarperCollins ebooks to the statewide consortium platform, which services 330 public libraries in the state.

“We are not trying to punish HarperCollins,” Jo Buder, the state librarian, told LJ. “We are just trying to figure out a way to provide these titles without damaging customer service. What do we do for a person who is 27th in line and has a hold? What does it mean to catalogers? It’s just all very bad customer service decisions,” she said.

Buder is now heading a task force that has been formed by the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) that is debating a response to HarperCollins. The task force teleconferenced on March 9 with representatives from Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Alaska, Colorado, Ohio, Texas, and Tennessee participating.

“We decided that we really want to approach publishers [directly], HarperCollins in particular, because we want to understand the issues more,” Buder said. “The interest is really so high.”[read the full article]

It’s always impressive to see so many libraries taking a concerted stand.

Looking down the road, what will a solution look like? An article in the Atlantic puzzles on this, and points to the approach taken by the NYPL and OverDrive:

Potash, whose Cleveland-based company has thrived in the often contentious atmosphere of dynamic change, believes that the solution is to recognize that even the demand for most bestsellers eventually settles down, and the number of e-books that libraries would have to re-purchase will turn out to be relatively small in the broader scheme of activity. OverDrive’s largest customer, the New York Public Library, is floating an intriguing concept: a form of metering. Once purchased, a book would be available for an extended period, and thereafter a small charge would accrue for further loans. For example, the New York system now has 125 copies of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but in three years it may only need a handful, and the revenue impact of pay-per-use could turn out to be small. Moreover, “dog-eared printed books” as one senior librarian explained to me, have always been replaced, and e-books significantly reduce the time, trouble, and expense of returning books back onto shelves.[read the full article]

The pay-per-use model has cropped up in other ideas for a compromised solution. Like a variable rate mortgage, it’s entirely possible that a pay-per-use model could save money in the long run. It could also end up costing more. It’s difficult to say, and it’ll be important to watch how libraries that adopt the model fair.

Pay-per-use may not be the most ideal solution. But in some form, it might be the best deal libraries will get, since publishers have the content, our users want access, and libraries who don’t have it will be left by the wayside.

If some libraries feel over a barrel, it’s because they are.

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Categories Academic Libraries, Book News, Library News, Public Libraries, Services, Technology, User experience, web tools

Medieval Tapestry is an Archive Made to Last

March 30, 2011 //

The good people at The Register have declared the Bayeux Tapestry one heck of an effective archival medium:

In the town of Bayeux in northern France you can see the world’s oldest information archive based on a long ribbon of material, a very early example of what was to become tape media…

From the endurance point of view the Tapestry has lasted almost 1000 years – an amazing record. The vegetable dyes used to colour the threads have kept their colour for nearly one hundred decades, and the woven cloth fabric has kept its structural integrity for the same time period despite several instances of mistreatment. Who says ribbons of “TAPEstry” are unreliable?[read full article]

I’ve never thought of the tapestry this way.  Mostly, I know it from the opening to Robinhood Prince of Thieves.

Art as a mnemonic recall tool has been used the world over.  Anyone familiar with indigenous peoples’ land claim disputes in Canada knows how wampum belts can be used as legal/historical documents.

In a world where so much cultural production is high-tech and/or disposable,  history will always provide examples of lower-tech approaches that have an enduring quality.

There are some risks. The Bayeux tapestry requires a mix of other records to survive for us to understand it.  A series of floods and fires could have wiped its story off the historical map. Still, it gets points for lasting.

Will today’s digital repositories achieve this sort of longevity? Even in the last 50 years,  some digital records has slipped from our grasp because of fast moving technological developments.

The Bayeux Tapestry is a good reminder to keep things simple. It’s also a reminder that archiving information, though a fallible process at the mercy providence, is important in information saturated times such as these.

It’s not about preserving a single item, like the tapestry. It’s important to work to capture the information that makes any single item make sense. This is the ongoing challenge and the wonderful mission of archives.

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Categories Amazing News!, Archives, Cataloguing, Technology, User experience

Margaret Atwood on eBooks, or How Will the Atwood Machine Sign eBooks?

March 29, 2011 //
the atwood machine at work

the Atwood Machine at work

Margret Atwood on the phenomenon of eBooks (via the Globe and Mail):

Every time there is a new medium, people get hypnotized by it: the printing press, radio, television, the Internet. It’s certainly a change in the world, which then somehow adapts. A whole section of society was very upset when zippers came in because they made it easier to seduce people in automobiles. You know, I think we’ve kind of adjusted to zippers by now. Just because you have a zipper doesn’t mean somebody has to unzip it … But you’re talking about e-books and e-readers and text in electronic form and the reading experience…

Well, it’s the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Everybody moves round a place. So the Book of the Month Club disappears and something else takes its share of the market. And then big publishers get in trouble and cut back, and that creates space for other publishers to acquire books they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to get.[read the whole interview]

It’s a bit of an odd interview. Atwood tries to take on the eBook issue from a writer’s perspective. The interviewer seems bent on getting her to declare eBooks and their kin to be a danger to society. Atwood doesn’t take the bait. Instead, she affirms eBooks as part of an ongoing evolution in communication technology.

I like how she ends the interview, responding to the question “Will the world be worse off if e-books fail?”:

Well, first let us picture what kind of event might lead to that: 1. Solar flares, which melt all the e-communication services. 2. Widespread plague, which is going to kill anyone running the companies that make them. So that being the case, I would say yes! That the world will be considerably worse off if, the next morning, you wake up and nobody’s reading anything on e-readers because the event that will have caused that is horrific!

There are people in the Library world who have adopted a sort of apocalyptic tone vis-a-vis eBooks. The full measure of what is lost and what is gained from technology shifts (c.f. the printing press ruined oral culture, but gave us the modern world, great books, etc. etc.) takes a while to shake down.

Atwood’s approach in this interview is a reminder that we don’t know what the full economic, cultural, and creative potential of the eBook will be. Or, how long that will take to come about.

***more on the Atwood Machine***

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Categories Book News, Literacies, Technology, User experience

On Things Recently Declared Dead: the Web

March 28, 2011 //

Have you heard the news?

Recently, Wired magazine declared the death of the web:

You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service.

You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.

This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen). The fact that it’s easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution.[full article]

Or in Clue-speak:  it was the User in the Internet with the App.

Declaring things dead doesn’t have the same bombast it used to, and it’s not entirely new news. Web 2.0 has been pushing it’s way into the Internet-user’s life for a few years now, and Wired is talking about the logical extension of that trend.

But, the article makes an important distinction between “browsing” and “getting.” This has to do with the rise apps-based user expectations and an achieved critical mass of online-content. I think browsing was useful in the past because there was no guarantee anything you wanted was out there. Now, Internet-savvy users are  surprised when something is NOT online. So, it’s not about finding, it’s about retrieving.

Libraries should play close attention to this, not because we’re not in the information/content retrieving business. This is what a good library does well, after all.

The issue at stake is competition.

The barriers to entry in the library’s field of online content delivery (eBooks, reference information, audio books, etc.) have been knocked down or scaled by competition that doesn’t share the same value system, operations cost, or even expectations of open access.

Again, this is not new news, just more pressure on libraries to innovate.

Looking for a counter-point? Try What’s Wrong With ‘X Is Dead’, from the Atlantic

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Categories Academic Libraries, Library Bric-a-brac, Library News, Public Libraries, Services, Technology, User experience

Library SoundTrack Fridays! the Vaccines, the Mountain Goats

March 25, 2011 //

the Vaccines are just sitting there

Library SoundTrack Fridays! Hooray!

I was off for a few days (recovering from an injury), and I had the chance to finally score some new music. Here are a couple highlights.

The Vaccines are a little like if the Magnetic Fields had a younger half-brother who was more fun at parties. Invite them over!

And, the Mountain Goats dropped a new album this week, too. I’m usually touch and go with the band (of one person). This track hooked me in.

Also, also, I cannot get enough of Teen Daze. I’ve written about them before, but what the hell, here’s a chill, dreamy track.

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Categories Library Soundtrack

I’m Sure the List is Greater than 50

March 25, 2011 //

From the Independent UK:

Education Secretary Michael Gove says that children aged 11 should be reading 50 books a year to improve literacy standards.

We asked three of Britain’s leading children’s authors and two of our in-house book experts to each pick 10 books, suitable for Year 7 students.

The authors chose books that have brought them huge joy, while expressing their outrage at the “great big contradiction” of Mr Gove’s claim to wish to improve literacy while closing libraries across the country.[check out the list and the full article]

The Independent’s list is heavily weighted towards older books. Is it nostalgia? Likely it’s a nod towards those worn, well loved youth novels that are probably sitting in any (presently threatened) UK  public library.

I can’t say it’s a bad list. I also can’t say, having read constantly my whole childhood, that I’ve read half of what’s on there.

Actually, child of the 80s I am, I think I’ve seen more of them as movies (i.e. the Phantom Tollbooth, which i felt was fairly inscrutable).  I don’t see Watership Down there (another amazing movie and book, by the way). I’m sure there’s a lot that could be added. How would a list like this look in Canada?

That said, spring’s almost here. It’s time to start thinking about  summer reading lists.  I think I’ll slip a few of these classics on mine.

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Categories About Me, Book News, Literacies, Public Libraries, Readers Advisory, Review

Because it’s fun and reasonably priced!

March 24, 2011 //

Reference Tshirt

I had some extra time last week, so I’ve been able to finally roll this out.

Fans of this site and of my Library Minimalism series can get in on the action.

You see, Drop the Reference Bomb’s merch store is now live!

Right now, there are posters, mugs, t-shirts, and totes that feature the best from my Library Minimalism prints. More items and prints will be added as inspiration and time allows, but I think I’m off to a good start.

Circulation Mug

Why Zazzle?

Because it’s customizable!

Don’t like the colour, fit, type of shirt? Want a stainless steel travel mug instead of a ceramic one? There are lots of options to choose from. I’ll start you off, but the final choice is up to you!

There are lots of library themed stuff out there, but I guarantee there’s not much like this! Plus, big spenders ($50 or more and not just at my store) from the US can get free shipping. I’ll also keep everyone posted about sales as they happen.

Cheers!

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Categories About Me, Amazing News!, Library Minimalism, Services, User experience

Amazing News! Fossil of giant rabbit discovered on island

March 23, 2011 //

I had a minor injury last week, and I’m just back to work today. While I catch up on my data-fixin’, I thought I’d pass this fun news on.

From the Toronto Star:

The skeleton of a giant rabbit about six times the size of a modern bunny has been found on an island off the coast of Spain.

The fossils of Nuralagus rex were found on the island of Minorca, according to details released Monday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Dubbed the Minorcan King of the Rabbits, the bunny lived approximately 3 million to 5 million years ago and weighed about 26 pounds.

It’s so large that when lead author Dr. Josep Quintana from the Institut Català de Paleontologia found the first bone, at age 19, he thought it belonged to the giant Minorcan turtle.

But it isn’t just its massive size that separates it from Peter Cottontail.

While modern rabbits have long, springy spines, N. rex had a short stiff spine that would have made hopping difficult.[full article]

I love a) the idea of a giant clumsy pre-historic rabbit and b) the photoshop job that came with the article.

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Categories Amazing News!
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