Computers in Libraries 2007: Day 2 - Comments in the Catalog: Community Interaction
Glenn Peterson, Hennepin County Library
Case Study
Comments are:
mini reviews
any title in the catalog
a “blog for every book” - cool way to think about it!
Gave brief history about their comments project:
started taking book reviews by kids and teens
then they thought - hey, adults might like to do this (not too successful)
mentioned that they custom-created this - Sirsi [...]
Computers in Libraries 2007: Day 2 - Rhumba with Joomla: Using a CMS to Build Community
Tao Gao and Catherine Buck Morgan
Joomla in Libraries - they created this
Why Joomla?
free open source
easy to use, install and it’s reliable
looked at Drupal - it’s much harder to grasp
separation of content and form
portable and extendable
strong support community
Why a redesign?
static html
table-based layout
etc… they needed to switch from an old web to a new web model
lessons learned [...]
Computers in Libraries 2007: Day 1 - Information Design for the New Web
Ellyssa Kroski, Reference Librarian, Columbia University
She blogs at infotangle
Looked at msn’s website circa 2000 - your eye doesn’t really center on anything
About.com - same type of thing
Google - early example of simple design - now the gold standard of web search
kodak from 2004 - it’s a photo sharing site, but it’s not apparent to the [...]
Computers in Libraries 2007: Day 1 - Webmaster Cool Tools
Darlene Fichter, Frank Cervone, Jeff Wisniewski
Another extremely packed room - I’m sitting on the floor with about 20 other people!
Jeff Wisniewski:
Yahoo pipes - it’s a feed aggregator. You can apply logic to the feeds (ie., filter the feed in various ways), it’s graphical (no coding involved).
- He uses it to pull in feeds for faculty [...]
Design for Your Audience
Louis Rosenfeld has started a 5-part series on Information Architecture. Part one includes this:
Step #1: Ban the word “redesign” from your meetings. Step #2: Determine who your most important audiences are. Step #3: Determine each primary audience’s 3-5 major needs. Step #4: Make damned sure your site addresses [...]
Library Catalog Usability and a Test of CamStudio
I am playing with CamStudio, and needed to create a short screencast, so…
At the same time, I was looking at Sirsi/Dynix Horizon sites, and found something slightly amusing (to me, anyway) and thought I’d share.
Click the image to the right to watch the video (here’s the .mov version too, if the m4v version doesn’t work [...]
Don’t Set Your MySpace Page Profile to Private!
I just saw Plainfield Public Library’s MySpace page (via Michael Stephens). Well, not really - take a look at the screenshot - their MySpace profile is set to private.
So what? Well… it’s a usability and experience thing. There will be MySpacers that want to peruse the page, see what programs the library has to offer, [...]
Find the Title of this Page
What’s the title of this page? Here are your options, by just taking a quick glance at the page:
Teens News (title tag, small type under large "start pages" text in orange box)
Start Pages (highlighted text in both orange areas, highlighted text in blue menu)
Teens’ News (highlighted text in left-hand menu and in larger orange box [...]
Jeffrey Veen’s Next Gen Web Design Presentation
Veen’s presentation on Next Generation Web Design and Web 2.0 rocks. It rocks on many levels:
It uses great presentation design… the slides look cool, they’re very visual, and you can get the gist of his message by just looking through the slides (but you can also tell you’re missing alot of good content, too)
It shows [...]
Make Subscribing to Blogs Easy
There’s one little thing that bugs me about blog design/usability - it’s where most of us place the Syndicate this Blog section… usually at the BOTTOM OF THE PAGE, and usually hidden in arcane geek language.
Generally, the syndicate/rss info is placed at the bottom of a blog site because that’s where the blog software designer [...]
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