For those wanting to be connected during the LITA Forum in San Jose, I have the scoop on internet access. According to the Marriott employee I spoke to, internet is available two ways. You can 1. Get high speed internet in your hotel room for $9.95 a day or 2. You can get wireless internet, available in the conference area and lobby for $9.95 a day. These two services are exclusive of each other and you do have to pay for them separately, unfortunately for us. If someone has better information, feel free to leave a comment.
Author: Michelle Boule
Reflecting On Trends
There have been so many great posts on this already, I am going to sort of skip the major summaries and get right to some reflections. I was surprised by the panel’s consensus that ILS and OPACs “suckâ€. I have long thought so, but it is not often that you get librarians stating that our main interface with which we greet the public is lacking is basic usability features. Maybe others have said it before, but it was the first time I had heard it so adamantly. What I heard overwhelmingly was that, as a business, libraries need to evaluate “disruptive†technologies and find ways to harness them for good. Many librarians see what we do as service rather than business, but I would argue that we do both. I think we need to take some queues from some other information businesses, Google anyone?, and re-evaluate how we present information…
LITA President's Program (take dos)
Digital Searching to Digital Reading Speaker: Michael Lesk author of Understanding Digital Libraries Are people really going to read books online? Do they want to? These are the opening questions that Michael Lesk posed to the audience. People want things electronically, but they do not necessarily want to read it online. Many do not take digitization and digital delivery of books very seriously, but there is a history of people not taking seriously the things which we now hold in places of honor. Lesk talked about Shakespeare, talking films, and languages. In my head I think about the world being flat and the sun revolving around the earth. Are digital libraries useful? Few evaluations have been made of current digital libraries. Lesk did a quick comparison of Google and some common scholarly digital resources by doing some sample searches. He found that Google does give more general things, but an…
An Ongoing Relationship Takes Work
Searching Digital Resources: Designing Usability Into Digital Interfaces Frank Cervone Steve DiDomenico & Jeannette Moss Stephen Abram Mike Visser Just when I think the room can not get any more packed, twenty people walk in the door. Sharon and I guard our space by the plugs in the back like librarians hyped on coffee. 😉 The Northwestern group speaks first: Northwestern redesigned their site about five years ago and they found through surveys and interactions that their patrons were currently frustrated with accessibility issues, so they did usability testing to find what actually works and what does not. They asked a random sample of students to complete particular tasks on their website and they recorded the computer screen during the ineraction, which they showed during the presentation. It was enlightening to see the common mistakes that users make on what seems to us to be a very explanatory web site….