2008

2008 National Forum: Using Library Labs to Shorten Service Lifecycle

Libraries expend a majority their limited human and financial resources to bring new products and services to their customers. However, libraries STILL have the tendency to wait until these products or services are ‘prefect’ ready before they are officially released. The rapid change in technology and the pressures of external ‘competition’ is requiring libraries to shorten their service lifecycles. The number of libraries discussing the concepts of agile development, perpetual beta, and rapid prototyping is encouraging. The one thing that all of these approaches have in common is including customers as active participants in the development and/or testing of new products and services. To that end, a growing number of libraries have been building “Library Labs,” which are based on the Google Labs concept. This approach to service development was discussed in the presentation “Building a Web-Based Laboratory for Library Users” by Jason J. Battles and Joseph (Jody) Combs. The…

2008

Weiling Liu, Building Collaborative Web Applications with Drupal

Weiling Liu, University of Louisville (Kentucky) Session summary: An excellent demonstration of the modular and flexible nature of Drupal, an open-source web content management system. Drupal has featured prominently in library conferences recently; however, one of the strengths of Liu’s presentation was in the two project examples she used: managing news and events web content that comes from a variety of library staff; and creating a library conference application that collected conference proposals, turned the accepted proposals into a conference schedule, and provided a place to link to conference presentations after the conference. Also useful are her “Lessons Learned the Hard Way” (near the end of this post). Liu began by describing Drupal and showing examples of Kentucky-area library sites that use Drupal. She then described two projects that used Drupal to solve what were complicated projects with poor workflows: enabling library staff to post content about library news and…

2008

2008 LITA Forum: Library 2.0 PDQ

“Library 2.0 PDQ: Meeting the Challenges of the Rapid Growth of Distance Learning and Off-site Courses at a University Regional Campus” was presented by John J. Burke and Beth E. Tumbleson from Miami University Middletown in Miami, OH. Miami U’s regional campuses are at the forefront of its distance learning push. During 2007 and 2008, the state of Ohio and the Miami U main campus issued new challenges for its regional campuses for delivering education. As a result, the Middletown library has faced many changes. Middletown is a commuter campus which has been offering courses for 40 years. They offer courses primarily to nontraditional students; the average age of students is 24, and most of them work at least part time. In 2007, Ohio announced a New University System which aimed to increase the number of degrees among Ohioans, and to expand the role of regional campuses to help meet…

2008

Optimizing Library Resources for Screen Readers

LITA National Forum 2008 Presenter: Nina McHale, Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver. The speaker started her presentation by sharing her experience navigating a website with a user with visual disability. She pointed out that even though the information structure on a website makes sense for us (the visual users), it does not necessarily make sense for users with screen readers. Making your website accessible is very important because the goal of a library is providing access and not providing barriers. Accessibility matters because: 10 million people in the US are blind or visually impaired; 1.3 million people are legally blind due to age or other health issues. screen readers are used by blind users as well as people with learning and physical disabilities. writing good code is good practice and makes the web pages more accessible to all. Nina pointed out why accessibility is an issue: proliferation use of…

2008

LITA National Forum '08: Portals to Learning: What librarians can learn from video game design

Presented by Nicholas Schiller, Washington State University and Carole L. Svensson, University of Washington Session description from the conference program: “If they are not already, video games are becoming as ubiquitous a media as television. Librarians will be better equipped to engage students in the practice of scholarly research if we understand the culture of gaming and what it means to say that our students are gamers. What should we make of this new and rapidly evolving media? What can we learn from the best examples of game design and development? What do players learn from games? What forms does this learning take? Are there useful pedagogies librarians can borrow from game designers? This presentation will focus on the instructional character of video games and how librarians can learn from the teaching that video game designers build into their craft. The conversation will focus on the video and computer game…

2008

2008 National Forum: IT Management: There is Too Much Stuff

This past Spring, our library ‘completed’ what was a fairly significant reorganization. The library formalized relationships with several strategic partners which had been residing in our building. One of the outcomes included bringing together three independent IT departments, which I have been responsible for pulling together. Needless to say, the 2008 LITA Forum session entitled “Re-swizzling the IT Enterprise for the Next Generation: Creating a Strategic and Organizational Model for Effective IT Management,” presented by Maurice York, Head, Information Technology North Carolina State University Libraries, caught my attention. Maurice described the evolution of IT services at NCSU Libraries, which, by the audience reaction, was one which many other libraries experienced (Maurice: everything does go on the home page, doesn’t it?….) In summary, the current state of IT management is that ”there is too much stuff.” He outlined the various IT Business Models that his organization has used at one time…

2008

Do They Really Know What They Need?

User-Centered Design for Humanities Collections within a Digital Library – LITA Forum 2008 Mark Phillips and Kathleen Murray, University of North Texas presented jointly on the challenges, goals and outcomes of user-centered design for humanities collections within a digital library. A link to their presentation is here. Mark is the Head of the Digital Projects Unit and has been involved with software development and digital content creation for the Portal to Texas History. Kathleen is a postdoctoral research associate working in the Digital Projects Unit at the University of North Texas Libraries. She has been involved in state-wide and national digital library projects and has presented at major library and information science conferences in the areas of needs assessment, digital libraries, and web archiving. Mark and Kathleen took turns presenting the challenges. Mark started by giving the technical background of the IOGENE project. They had to take this in three…

2008

LITA National Forum 2008: Tim Spalding: "Library 2.0 is in Danger"

The 2008 LITA National Forum opened Friday afternoon with a general opening session remarks by Tim Spalding, founder and developer, of LibraryThing.com. Tim presented What is Social Cataloging and Why Should You Care? (Blogging relatively ‘Live’ thanks to spotty ‘free’ wireless, a wired connection in my room, and a charged battery.) I have to admit that I played around with LibraryThing a bit when it first went online, but not much since. My take is that for individuals it is essentially Facebook for book readers. For libraries, however, it can provide a fresh discovery layer for legacy catalog systems. There are seven libraries using LibraryThing for Libraries, including the High Plains Library District. Tim started out with some updated statistics. LibraryThing now catalogs over 32 million books and is larger than the Library of Congress. Users can search for books using Amazon and 690 libraries. While at it’s core LibraryThing remains a personal cataloging…

2008

2008 National Forum: Civil Rights Digital Library

P. Toby Graham presented an overview of the structure and holdings of the Civil Rights Digital Library, the most comprehensive effort so far to provide digitized material on the civil rights movement. There is a video archive, a learning objects component that provides curricular support, and the portal. The library is based in the University of Georgia Libraries and was launched in the spring of 2008. Graham began by showing some video from the digital library, specifically from the Albany movement. This montage of video contained such material as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. exhorti ng the African-American community to remain nonviolent after the brutal beating of a pregnant young woman holding a child. Graham interspersed the clip montage with explanation of what was happening. The video is impressively clear, and the sound is quite good, allowing users to not only learn about but feel the singing and prayers in…

2008

LibX – Enhancing User Access to Library Resources

LibX – Enhancing User Access to Library Resources Annette Bailey, Virginia Tech LibX – A Browser Plugin for Libraries Annette reviewed the history of LibX and the initial motivation behind creating this tool: users were increasingly bypassing the library and using search engines and other online search tools. LibX, as a browser plugin, puts the library back into the research process by guiding the user to library resources no matter where they are online. Edition Builder Study The LibX team conducted a study of Edition Builder, a LibX feature that allows libraries to create LibX editions for their particular library. Through analyzying their user logs, and a user survey that included 139 participants, they asked three questions about Edition Builder: Is the interaface easy to learn and use? (yes) How successful are edition maintainers in creating LibX editions? (successful) Is the auto-discovery feature effective? (yes) According to self-reports, the majority…