While we’re talking about social software, let’s talk about libraries using the tools that their students and patrons are already using. Union College in Schenectaty NY takes advantage of iTunes’ feature allowing other people on the same network to listen to each other’s music. So, if I’m at the library using the wireless and someone else is at the library using the wireless and has decided to make their music available, I can listen to it as if it were my music. The library uses their own copy of iTunes to offer tracks of new music that is available for checkout at the library. Innovative, free and clever!
Category: ‘puters
co-browsing: why use software that you can’t use and patrons don’t like?
The Librarian in Black has a few more things to say about co-browsing in her post How much is co-browsing really helping our users?
I stopped trying to use co-browsing a long time ago. It’s bad customer service to give something to someone that has a good chance of not working. Period. Everyone touts co-browsing as the cat’s pajamas, and it is kind of cool A) when it actually works, which is rare and B) when the user’s question actually warrants it…. I am not a co-browsing fan. At all. If the big-name software companies can get to work on a Mac with a firewall and a dial-up connection running Firefox, then rock on. I’ll be a fan.
librarians do and do not need to be coders.
When I said “librarians need to be coders” I mostly meant that they need to involve themselves in their technology. Science Library Pad has gone further and explicated this idea with a fancy diagram and some smart talk. Go read librarians 2.0 don’t need to be coders 2.0
Don’t try to build big complex systems. Live in the beta world. Get some chunk of functionality out quickly so that people can play with it. The hardest part is having the initial idea, and the good news is I see lots of great ideas out in the library blogosphere. I can understand the frustrations in the gap between the idea and running code, but I hope I’ve presented a bunch of areas above in which you can work to turn the idea into the next hot beta, without necessarily needing to code it yourself.
The systems world is not just buy/build. It’s buy, build, transform, collaborate, extend, transform, inspire, lead…
my tag cloud and forcing an opac solution
Jason Griffey makes a good point, the “tag cloud” I referred to when talking about daveyp’s OPAC subject cloud was a bit of a misnomer. Now that I’m using LibraryThing, at least a little bit, I have been looking at my author cloud which makes me think one thing “Man I read on the plane a lot!”
I’ve been swapping email with Tim over at LibraryThing because I’ve been talking to some small libraries (less than 10,000 volumes) about OPAC ideas. LibraryThing doesn’t have an enterprise version yet, but it’s got some features I’d love to see in my own OPAC, like a feed for “recently added” books, options for turning book cover display on or off (why is this so hard?) and all the cloudy goodness. The small-library OPACs I’ve seen are often either kludgey stripped-down versions of larger ILSes, or they’ve got terrible web implementation which seems added on as an afterthought. If anyone has seen a stand-alone OPAC that’s attractive, cheap and easy for non-techies to implement, please let me know. We don’t need patron or money management features, just the book parts, and maybe a “checked in/out” flag.
While you’ve got your OPAC hat on, read the ILS Customer Bill of Rights and the four fundamental must-haves.
- Open, read-only, direct access to the database
- A full-blown, W3C standards-based API to all read-write functions
- The option to run the ILS on hardware of our choosing, on servers that we administer
- High security standards
Is that too much to ask? Don’t miss the comments, I’m going to make “glommed-together, katamariesque nightmare ILS codebase ” part of my lexicon. What’s katamari, you ask?
how do patrons perceive your filtering system?
Filtering is a reality that many libraries have to deal with in order to get funding for their connectivity and/or technology. I think some libraries give up once they have to filter and don’t make the patrons’ filtering interactions as user-friendly as their other library interactions.