Recently I read an article that discussed digital signage at the San Jose State University library. The concerns raised by librarian Laurel Eby are very valid, especially if you don’t have any background in graphic design. Questions about content, slide duration, number of slides, and even branding are big questions that can impact how effectively your message gets across. Many, many jokes have been made about how short our attention spans are lately. (Ooh, look – a kitty!) But when you’re designing things that are meant to get – and, hopefully, keep – a person’s attention, there is a seed of truth behind the joke…and you can’t ignore it. Because if you ignore that, then your patrons will ignore you. When I studied television production, we were told about the “elevator pitch”. If you’re not familiar, imagine you’re in an elevator with a famous director – let’s say Steven Spielberg….
Category: Original Content
A Linked Data Journey: Interview with Allison Jai O’Dell
Image Courtesy of AJC under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license. Introduction This is part three of my Linked Data Series. You can find the previous posts in my author feed. I’ve decided to spice things up a bit and let you hear from some library professionals who are actually implementing and discussing Linked Data in their libraries. These interviews were conducted via email and are transcripts of the actual interviews, with very minor editorial revisions. This first interview is with Allison Jai O’Dell. Bio: Allison Jai O’Dell is Metadata Librarian and Associate University Librarian at the University of Florida, George A. Smathers Libraries. She is on the editorial teams of the RBMS Controlled Vocabularies and the ARLIS/NA Artists’ Books Thesaurus – and is working to publish both as enriched, five-star linked datasets. Learn more about her from her website. The Interview Can you give a brief description of TemaTres? TemaTres is a…
Agile Development: Building an Agile Culture
Over the last few months I have described various components of Agile development. This time around I want to talk about building an Agile culture. Agile is more than just a codified process; it is a development approach, a philosophy, one that stresses flexibility and communication. In order for a development team to successfully implement Agile the organization must embrace and practice the appropriate culture. In this post will to briefly discuss several tips that will help develop Agile development. The Right People It all starts here: as with pretty much any undertaking, you need the right people in place, which is not necessarily the same as saying the best people. Agile development necessitates a specific set of skills that are not intrinsically related to coding mastery: flexibility, teamwork, and ability to take responsibility for a project’s ultimate success are all extremely important. Once the team is formed, management should work to bring team members closer together and create the right environment for…
A Linked Data Journey: Proof of Concept
Courtesy of Alex Berger under a CC BY-NC 2.0 license Introduction This is part two of my Linked Data Series. You can find the first post here. Linked Data is still a very abstract concept to many. My goal in this series is to demystify the notion. To that end I thought “wouldn’t it be cool to put Linked Data to practice, to build a proof-of-concept record”, so I did. I decided to create a Linked Data catalog record, because I wanted to write something relatively quickly, though I later found out that even writing a simple catalog record in Linked Data was going to be more effort than I anticipated. About the Record Link to display record: link Link to visual graph of record: link Link to code: link First, here’s a link to the display record. It might take a second to load, as it is pulling in…
Agile Development: Sprint Retrospective
In my last two posts I’ve discussed how to carry out sprint review and sprint planning meetings. This month we’ll look at the final component of the sprint boundary process, the sprint retrospective, which is where the team analyzes its inner workings. Objective The sprint retrospective is an opportunity for the development team to review their performance over the previous sprint, identify strengths and weaknesses, and modify processes to increase productivity and well-being. Timing The retrospective should take place near the end of the iteration. It usually follows the sprint review, and can be held immediately following, but some sort of boundary should be established (take a short break, change the room, etc.) to make it clear that these are two very different meetings with very different purposes. The length of the meeting will change from sprint to sprint; budget as much time as you think you will need to fully explore team performance. If there isn’t much of substance…
It’s a Brave New Workplace
LITA Blog Readers, I’ve got a new job. For the past month I’ve been getting my sea legs at the University of Houston’s M.D. Anderson Library. As CORC (Coordinator of Online Resources and Collections), my job is supporting data-driven collection decisions and processes. I know, it’s way cool. I have come to realize that the most challenging aspect of adapting to a new workplace may well be learning new technologies and adjusting to familiar technologies used in slightly different ways. I’m text mining my own notes for clues and asking a ton of questions, but switching from Trello to Basecamp has been rough. No, let’s be honest, the most challenging thing has been navigating the throngs of undergrads on a crowded campus. Before working remotely for years, I worked at small nonprofits, graduated from a teeny, tiny liberal arts college, and grew up in a not-big Midwestern town. You may…
Triaging Technologies
I manage digital services and resources at a small academic library with minimal financial and human resources available. For almost a year, I served as solo librarian for fixing and optimizing the library website, library services platform, electronic resources, workflows, documentation, and other elements of technology management vital to back-end operations and front-end services. Coping with practical limitations and a vast array of responsibilities, I resorted to triage. In triage management, the primary consideration is return on investment (ROI) – how stakeholder benefits measure against time and resources expended to realize those benefits. Condition Black: The technology must be replaced or phased out because it is dysfunctional and impossible to fix. Into this category fell our website, built with the clunky and unusable Microsoft SharePoint; our laptops running Windows XP and too old to upgrade to a more current operating system; and our technology lending service, for which we had no funds to upgrade the dated technologies on offer. Down the…
A Linked Data Journey: Introduction
retrieved from Wikipedia, created by Anja Jentzsch and Richard Cyganiak Introduction Linked data. It’s one of the hottest topics in the library community. But what is it really? What does it look like? How will it help? In this series I will seek to demystify the concept and present practical examples and use-cases. Some of the topics I will touch on are: The basics Tools for implementing linked data Interviews with linked data practitioners What can you do to prepare? In this part one of the series I will give a brief explanation of linked data; then I will attempt to capture your interest by highlighting how linked data can enhance a variety of library services, including cataloging, digital libraries, scholarly data, and reference. What is Linked Data? I’m not going to go into the technical detail of linked data, as that isn’t the purpose of this post. If you’re…
My Capacity: What Can I Do and What Can I Do Well?
I like to take on a lot of projects. I love seeing projects come to fruition, and I want to provide the best possible services for my campus community. I think the work we do as librarians is important work. As I’ve taken on more responsibilities in my current job though I’ve learned I can’t do everything. I have had to reevaluate the number of things I can accomplish and projects I can support. Libraries come in all different shapes and sizes. I happen to work at a small library. We are a small staff—3 professional librarians including the director, 2 full-time staff, 1 part-time staff member, and around 10 student workers. I think we do amazing things at my place of employment, but I know we can’t do everything. I would love to be able to do some of the projects I see staff at larger universities working on,…
iPads in the Library
Getting Started/Setting Things Up Several years ago we added twenty iPad 2s to use in our children’s and teen programming. They have a variety of apps on them ranging from early literacy and math apps to Garage Band and iMovie to Minecraft and Clash of Clans*. Ten of the iPads are geared towards younger kids and ten are slanted towards teen interests. Not surprisingly, the iPads were very popular when we first acquired them. We treated app selection as an extension of our collection development policy. Both the Children’s and Adult Services departments have a staff iPad they can use to try out apps before adding them to the programming iPads. We bought a cart from Spectrum Industries (a WI-based company; we also have several laptop carts from them) so that we had a place to house and charge the devices. The cart has space for forty iPads/tablets total. We use an…