Best of the Web
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
Continued Online Community Engagement
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 for libraries and museums
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
Help your library be omnipresent without spending a dime
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,
Website redesign pitfalls
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
Computers in Libraries
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.
