Looking for a Web Developer

Wanna move to Kansas? We’re looking for a Web Developer:
“The Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library is seeking a creative, energetic Web Developer to help move our Digital Branch to the next level of sophistication. The successful candidate will help maintain and build-out tscpl.org, help develop specialty sites, build searchable databases, and work on web [...]

CIL2008, Day 1: Fast & Easy Site Tune-ups

Speaker: Jeff Wisniewski
Keep content fresh
- Update your copyright date! You can use code to do this
- add a last updated script to your page (do it as an external script so you use one script in many places
- add photos to contacts! Goes a long way in increasing user’s trust in a website
Turn boring old [...]

SXSWi2008, Day 2: ExpressionEngine 2.0 Sneak Peek

Session by Ellis Lab, makers of ExpressionEngine, a CMS we’re using for our new Digital Branch.
Note to David - there’s an Ellis Labs party - t-shirts!
Goal - you should have control of the code and the design - design shouldn’t have to work around the CMS
They have paid support staff
They claim it’s becoming very popular [...]

New Digital Branch

Some of you might have noticed I’ve been dropping very vague hints on this blog about my library’s website redesign… well, no more vagueness! In fact - how about checking it out for yourselves? Go to webdev.tscpl.org and and see what my web team has been busy creating.
A few asides:

If something doesn’t work, most likely [...]

No More Kicking

Remember my post from January, Kicking Users Out the Door? Interestingly, after my post (about worldcat.org and a poor user experience I had), I was contacted by two OCLC employees!
They realized that “Goodbye” was not the message they wanted to leave with customers, and asked me where I had seen it, what I was doing, [...]

Kicking Users Out the Door

When you request a book using OCLC’s Worldcat service, here’s what happens after you complete a request - you are presented with this message: “Your resource sharing request was sent successfully. Goodbye.”
What was that again?
Goodbye.
Is that REALLY the message OCLC wants to send after someone has requested a book through their service? Goodbye? What if [...]

IL2007, Day 1: Putting Evidence-based Practice to Work

Putting Evidence-based Practice to Work, Frank Cervone and Amanda Hollister
Frank:

most librarians haven’t been trained in HCI
defined evidence-based practice
data provides primary evidence for decision-making
it’s not “common sense” - different stuff generally happens than what you “think” will happen
Ex - doing a usability test, then comparing it with other similar tests to see the larger picture
similar to [...]

Community and the Digital Experience

I’m knee-deep in wading through a bunch of articles and books on various aspects of experience design for the book I’m writing on digital experience planning, and I just had an epiphany today: I’m insane!
(No, wait - that’s not it…)
Ok - so I’ve been thinking about experience lately, both for my book and for the [...]

ALA2007: Ambient Findability: Librarians, Libraries, and the Internet of Things

Peter Morville - very fun to hear! Good stuff, too.
Lead-off quote: Information that’s hard to find will remain information that’s hardly found.
organize websites so people can find what they’re looking for - that’s how he explains his job to his mom
provide multiple paths to the same information
What does usable mean? His honeycomb… :
useful, desirable, [...]

Labels - Consistency and Context

I’ve been pondering website labels lately… (boy, that David - he’s truly a geek!). No really - we’re going through a major website overhaul right now, and we’re to the point where we’re looking at labels (ie., does “Databases” really mean anything to our visitors?).
And so here are a few real-world examples of labels [...]

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