General information

Interview with LITA Twitter chat panelist Adam Olsen

Twitter Chat graphic

The LITA Twitter chat on May 31 (1pm Eastern/12pm Central) will feature two projects and four panelists. In this post, we interview panelist Adam Olsen (@theloraxster) from Western Carolina University. Western Carolina University recently launched a media wall that displays study room availability, events in the building, and the library’s social media feeds. They are planning on adding a number of additional features in the future.  We recently interviewed Adam about this project.

Q. Tell us a little about your role at your institution. What are you responsible for?

I’m the web development and user experience librarian at WCU Hunter Library.  I handle the administration of most of our web-based applications, as well as do user experience studies, particularly regarding web sites.

Q. Describe your project, its purpose, and its goals.

The project was to create a “media wall.”  This is four screens that can display content in different ways.  This could be all four screens acting as one screen, or the screens all having different content (even multiple windows within a single screen).  For the time being, we have four pieces of content, one per screen. The two most important pieces of content are the study room availability screen, and the events in the library building screen (this is the content that sold admin on the project).

Q. What was the biggest challenge you faced, and how did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge was the hardware/software.  This particular product currently operates only on Windows 7 (yes, windows 7).  It also is limited in what it can do with web browsers. It can have multiple instances of IE11 running but only one instance of Chrome at a time.  We overcame this by developing applications that can run in IE 11.

Q. Is there anything else you’d like to share about yourself and your project?

The project has a lot of utility and even more potential, just be aware of the limitations of the vendor and hardware/software when starting a project like this.

Q. Do you have a link (website/GitHub/etc.) that demonstrates your project or shares documentation or other information about it?

https://www.signage.dtri.com/products/WCM/index.html  is the vendor we use, but I don’t know if I would recommend them full-stop.  I can talk more about that.

To participate

Launch your favorite Twitter app or web browser, search for the #LITAchat hashtag, and select “Latest” to participate and ask questions. Be sure to include the hashtag #litachat.

View more information, as well as past LITAchats.

Questions or Comments?

For all other questions or comments related to LITA events, contact us at (312) 280-4268 or lita@ala.org