Librarian by Day

Best of the web
Firefox
- Greasemonkey
- smart key words
- can use set up address bar to seach any site on the web
- customize google extension
- better gmail2 – takes ads off of gmail

google reader
-    helvetireader

• book city jackets
• wikimedia commons
• flickr image search
• pictobrowser
• skitch – screenshots, then allows for annotation, can upload directly to flickr
• jing – can do screenshots and screencasts
• screentoaster
• vimeo – look at the sign up process, even if you’re not going to use it, go through to look at sign up process, your libraries processes should be like this
• postrank
• copypastecharacter.com
• today’smeet
• when is good
• letmegooglethatforyou
• colorlovers
• tagcrowd
• wordle
• qature – real time aggregation of whats happening on twitter
• search.twitter.com
• tweetdeck
• vyew – free online web conferencing tool
• bacolicious
• wordpress theme called thematic very powerful
• ted.com
• googlevoice – get a number from google, calls will be routed to phone, voicemails will get transcribed
• googleforms
• zohocreator
• netnewswire – only for macs
• prezi
• 280slides
• lovelycharts
• typetester
• evernote
• zotero
• worldtimeserver.com
• tadalist.com
• hulu
• toodledo
• sendyouit
• emic4all – records in mp3,  audacity to edit
• logmein.com – remote support
• dropbox

Control what you can

-    Brand – logo, identity
-    public website
-    opportunities for practice
-    best practices online

let go when you can
-    what is tied to your brand
-    where can you let go?
-    What needs to have a system wide project?

Trust
-    trust staff
-    give guidelines
-    provide opportunities to learn

Evaluate
-    honestly assess performance
-    find the right person for the job
-    accept that it will take time
-    accept that there will be mistakes
-    it is a learning experience

Communities have been around for years they do police themselves, think of book review on Amazon, some will be positive and some will be negative

Social media monitoring
Do we really need to talk about why again, everyone that matters is doing it
Customer service – when you get negative feed back go out and respond
Identify stakeholders

Technorati
Google search
Backtype
Discussion boards – niche communities
Boardtracker
Twitter
Friendfeed
Flock
Optiem
Techregime

Not about the tools, its about the community using the tools
Cultivating a culture of learning
Learning is not a spectator sport
Libraries are not a spectator sport

Stewardship –
Helping people manage info exchange
Creating a space for innovation

Open circle concept, it’s the public’s library

People assume their experience is unique, that someone else will tell that story.

Movement strategy – make it relevant, be flexible to accommodate buy in
Provide incentives

Blend online and face to face, you benefit more

Put together a mission statement

Flickr commons develop in 2007 – LoC approached Flickr about sharing photos, encouraging users tagging jan 16th 2008 launched Many nations now participating Can now only search the commons

http://www.flickr.com/commons/

Brooklyn Museum – contributing to the commons caused flickr account to get flooded with comments, also posting photos that they “think” are something posting to flickr confirms or discredit it

Can no longer respond to all comments, just completely got overwhelmed, it was no longer the small user community they knew and loved, were very close to leaving

Goes beyond community working with their stuff, they are also helping with our workload What is the best way to add images to existing sets?

Ask the question of the commons community, and you’ll get an answer

Library of Congress Power commoners –

do historical research and get really involved History detectives provide support to their statements by linking to sources online

People provide personal memories of photos Historical context discussions Then and now photos

New York Public Library – Flickr puts photos in space more accessible than they currently are, Failed in the creation of community – they framed it as a technology project,

No know copyright restrictions, other rights like privacy

If someone posted a question who was going to answers? The subject specialist, got some irate responses from curators saying how could they do this with their stuff? They are now trying to engage where they can, rather than thinking about it as a distribution channel for photos or technology look at it as community engagement

Smithsonian – considered it more of a social experiment, than a technology issues

Wide range of subject matter means communicating with widely different community of users

What you need is a small group of like minded people at your institution to get it started, once it takes off (quick victory project) and the positive feedback starts other will be lining up to participate

Questions

One of the problems is that flickr is created for individual users, when you use it for a institution you have one password that everyone has, that might not be the greatest thing Flickr allow strikeouts so handy for corrections Copyright isn’t the only issue – if there is a picture of a person, that person or descendants might have some rights to the photo

Embedded and widgetized library
- Dcpl – iphone app
- Chat widgets – question point
- igoogle gadgets

flickr badge creator – can do thru flickr

steal this code now please
- lets give it away – allow users to remis our source code for their own customized applications on any of their pages or sites

make it easy so patrons can just copy and paste code, doesn’t need to be hard

is putting code out there safe? Check with web & it folks to be sure

but people will start using our stuff –

creating a steal this code tool
- decide what kind of widget you want to offer – catalog, databases, combo catalog & databases, web-based or IM chat
- plan webpage layout of widget and code generator textarea
- provide a working example of the widget so people know exactly what they are getting
-

the magic of html forms – simple catalog search example

examples
auariua library – steal this code page
university of Colorado Denver –
university of Minnesota dulutch UMD library

advertise service
prepared for success

reasons to give it away
platform independent
fun opportunities

Mobi – easy to use to create a mobile website – need to stay simple,

we watched Eddie Izzard youtube lego star wars death star canteen while waiting, warning there are swear words in the video if that sort of thing offends you

Redesign the pitfalls and perils and how to avoid them

Good reason to redesign

• When nav is dysfunctional
• When your site doesn’t scale
• When your site is difficult to update
• When you code is helplessly sick
• When your site has poor usability
• When its not performing based on you objectives / goals

Redevelop vs redesign

Redevelop = triple bypass

Redesign = cosmetic surgery

If its not broke don’t fix it, if users are finding their way around, consider just cosmetic update – example Amazon.com

Quiet death of major relaunch – users don’t like redesign

Facebook ainti redesign group has 1.7 million members

Last.fm

Caveats

Beware the vocal majority

Be evidence based

Five stages of user grief

• Denial – why did you change it?
• Anger – you have made the site useless, I’ll never use it again
• Bargaining – if you would just go back to the old version of a certain portion, it would be great
• Depression – I have no idea what I’m going to do now
• Acceptance – I dislike the new design but I was able to find what I’m looking for

Do we really need to redesign

Maintenance = boring, redesign = exciting

At launch you will be really happy and become less happy over time

At launch the user will be unhappy and become more happy over time

Pitfalls

- failing to account for assessment time and effort

Spend your money where the water is – know where your water is,

Look at where people are going int eh site, where they are not going, what pages they enter into, what pages they leave from – google analytics, clicky

review past usability studies

if its been a while do one now

tip – find and document your current page rank

do not want to loose page rank as the result of a redesign

tips on generating buy-in

– show manager or director other sites, what other libraries are doing

– show him or her data indicating that redesign

trying to reach too much consensus or death by committee, avoid committee if at all possible, if you must have a committee make it as small as possible

define constituencies and include them in the process

librarians are users but they are also experts, do not design your website for library staff, design it for your users

planning thinking outside the box

is a traditional page based model what you want? consider – cms,  blog,  wiki

don’t spend too much time designing – its all be done before

Seth Godin – “I’m going to out on a limb and beg you not to create an original design. There are more than a million pages on the web. Surely there’s one you can start with.”

Users expectations are not formed by library websites. You should not be looking to other libraries for examples of what users expect

Goals – specific and measurable

Increase google page rank

Show x percentage improvement in usability

Decrease time for adding new content

Pitfall – failing to communicate

• be open and transparent
• redesign blog or wiki to keep public and colleagues aware of what’s happening, helps manage users expectations

cook library web site redesign blog

Execution

Pitfalls – communicating too much,

• redesign by committee is not pretty
• look to evidence to short circuit tedious discussions

pitfall – not providing users a clear path

define the primary functions of your site and make sure those paths are clear

Queens Library example – good example of prime goal being connecting people with their tasks

Pitfall – don’t reinvent the wheel – from javascripts to CSS chances are its already been done

Spend money & time on

1 .Remarkable content – you have a staff full of experts – use them to create content,

- remarkable content is well written content, not cut and paste! Invest time in creating content specifically for the web

2. remarkable tools – next gen opac, federate search, engagement tools, user interaction options

3.

redesign for search engine optimization

- simple urls are better

- descriptive unique titles for every single page

- proper and consistent use of structural html

- descriptive alt tags

after you’re done submit a new sitemap to google

ask google to remove outdated/removed content from their cache

redesigning with social media content in mind

social bookmarks

tag your pages

don’t move or eliminate good content – don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater

update robots.txt file

update analytics definitions

pitfall – plan beyond the redesign

- content strategy

- maintenance strategy

I’m at Computers and Libraries this week so the next few days will be filled with conference posts.  I’ll even be presenting on Tuesday afternoon, just after lunch.

I came in yesterday and stopped by the gadgets and gaming session last night to see some cool toys including the Kindle 2!  There are so many new toys I want

If you’re following from afar the hash tag is #cil2009, you can follow on Twitter, or Jason Griffey has pulled together everything using Yahoo Pipes.

you haven’t heard yet, the fabulous Joshua M. Neff, Steve Lawson and Iris Jastram have created The Shovers and Makers award.

And there is only one way to become a Shover and Maker: declare yourself one.

No one knows what you have been doing all year as well as you do. No one knows what motivates you, what your professional passions are, why you work so hard on behalf of your patrons, clients or co-workers. So only you really know why you are a winner. Please write a quick profile of why you are a winner this year, and it will get published on this site.

Of course I nominated myself and I’m loving reading everyone else’s.  So head over there and declare yourself a Shover and Maker!