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, [...]

Copyright vs Creative Commons on Library Websites

I was just looking at Nashville Public Library’s website - very attractive site! They redesigned last year, and now have a great website, full of web 2.0-ish goodness.
And then I saw this in their footer: “Copyright © 2006 Nashville Public
[...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Target Being Sued for Website Inaccessibility

Go read “Court Denies Target.com Plea for Dismissal,” from the Web Site Accessibility Blog. The Federal Court Judge marilyn Hall Patel has ruled that “a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind.”
What Target lost was their plea for dismissal - not the ruling on whether or not federal law on [...]

Five Types of Content on a Library Website

I’ve been thinking through different content types that tend to be presented on library websites. Here’s what I have so far:

Traditional Content, or “Stuff we Buy”: this is the no-brainer area. It includes books, videos, music, journals, etc. All the usual stuff that libraries collect.  The main thing to remember here is to be format-agnostic. [...]

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