Category: ‘puters

Check me out! There’s an article this week in my alternative weekly about my email class and technology in general in Vermont’s libraries.

Erica Olsen astutely and succinctly puts her finger on it. A lot of library web sites suck. If they’re not flat out ugly, they’re deficient in other ways like usability, accessibility, poorly customized templates or just plain old lack of updates. They ignore conventional widsom about web design standards and fail to use clear page titles, citeable URLs, coherent navigational structures and, amazingly, meta tags. They have bad, or severely lacking, search capabilities. I’m not sure why this is true, and libraries certainly aren’t the only profession so afflicted but we are one that should know better. Erica’s not all snark though, she also includes a list of examples of good design in a subsequent post.

Berkeley Public Library is going RFID in order to reduce theft and worker injuries. The outlay of cash comes at a time when the library can ill-afford it. From what I’ve been hearing, this will cost roughly 50 cents a book and has also been the impetus for a massive weeding campaign where books not deemed wirth a fifty cent RFID tag are being tossed.

It really seems to me that one of Google’s biggest strengths is taking things that others offer in a saturated-with-ads way and giving it to you with a clean and simple interface, and easy permalinks. In case you’re wondering what my commute to work is like [and I’m home today, snowstorm] that link goes there. Big bummer, doesn’t work with Safari.

One thing we know about the web is that it’s very easy to index and store and retrieve text, and very very difficult to make ISAR systems for other sorts of media. We’ve seen an inkling of what’s to come with Google Video which uses the nifty hack of indexing the closed captioning to give entry points into visual content. Of course, as we know, closed captioning isn’t perfect.

Moving on…. there have been a few library bloggers podcasting lately, including Open Stacks’ Greg Schwartz [welcome back!]. Matt Haughey has been talking about podcasting on his blog for a while now. It’s an interesting idea, and a great way to push regular audio content, if you’re already creating it. I’m personally very rarely plugged in to my ‘pod for that long at a stretch, and I’m just not sure the usual format of “hey get this MP3 stream automagically in your feed” works for the way I currently consume media, but I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise. I’d love to see some good indexing/search features so you didn’t just have a title/author to go by: where’s all the spicy metadata?

On the other hand, visually disabled patrons who have been after us to get more information accessible via the voice mail system [new titles, possibly even book chapters] might find this really incredibly useful. This whole post was really just a way to get around to mentioning PennSound, a directory of poetry recordings. While the site has some interface design issues, it has a great vision and so far a pretty good execution. I feel like I could spend entire days digging around in poetry audio archives [a favorite], perhaps I should try podcasting that?