Just say no to shrinkwrap licenses on reference books. In fact, say “Hell no!” Ads in textbooks? No, no, no!
Author: jessamyn
a few words about the Google paradigm w/r/t libraries
Siva Vaidhyanathan who is one of the contributors to his great blog Sivacracy recently pulled out some comments I’d written about Google’s strong move into the world of [formerly] library content. If you haven’t read his book The Anarchist in the Library I strongly suggest you do so.
Library Journal Redesign
Library Journal’s redesign is up and available. I can’t say I’m too impressed, though I am a tough customer. Here is my bulleted list of critique following my first 15 minutes on the LJ site
- no rss feeds
- search delivers a segmented results set, subscriber-only pages come up first, then pages available to anyone, lower on the screen. This doesn’t seem like a sure-fire way to get more subscribers, just to alienate non-subscribers [example]
- searching in the “reviews” section leads to a subcribe page for anyone not logged in as a subscriber
- URLs are still long and unclean [example]
- no 404 page [example]
- fixed width columns make site hard to read at large text sizes and require a lot of scrolling
- empty content areas [example]
- ads are giant and blinky, this may be necessary in today’s tough times but blinky ads, banner ads, text ads, and parent company ads and logos make the home page a mishmash of colors and sizes making it very hard to figure out where the important content is
- Search our reviews section is non-functional. Search boxes are available, but all searches redirect to the LJ home page [example]
- The privacy policy and terms of use pages seem broken on at least some sub-pages [example]
Some of these critiques are just bugs that I’m sure will be fixed fairly quickly and are standard in brand new sites. Others have more to do with the actual structure of the site and what it’s set up to do. Library Journal has always had good printable templates and pretty great writing. However, a web site that has almost thirty sections and forty topics [accessible via pulldown menus] really could benefit from an information architect, or some groupings more like the site map, which is my favorite page on the site so far. Does it validate? No. Is it accessible? No. Since LJ is a business and not a library, they can take the risk of losing the business of people who can’t use or understand their site. Public libraries aren’t so fortunate, and this site is not a great example of a 2005 web site of an otherwise pretty nice looking magazine.
Gorman & Google cage match
Michael Gorman has some bad points and some good points in this Chronicle of Higher Education interview about Google. Good points: serious scholarship is about deep knowledge which is harder to get through Google in its current incarnation, than through print. Bad points: most library users are not scholars, really inappropriate hip-hop metaphor, inability to see the future usefulness of short scannable interlinked bits of knowledge for many day-to-day applications. Gorman is, in some ways, a librarian’s librarian, but he sure doesn’t come across as the public’s librarian. Some discussion on LISNews. This is my favorite excerpt from there.
I’m reminded of a quote in The Name of the Rose, something like “Brother Salvatore is guilty…. of confusing the love of poverty with the hatred of wealth.” I’m becoming more and more convinced that Gorman is confusing the love of accurate searching with the hatred of digital forms of information.
how the library is not like a bookstore, part eleventyteen
I enjoy the Stay Free! blog a lot. Today Carrie has a blurb that includes information from a New York Times story about big box bookstores like Barnes & Noble determining display space by how much they get paid by the publisher. I had always sort of cited this as something I knew, but I was never sure how I knew it. Carries adds this tidbit with request for authoritative citation, anyone know?
In fact, a label rep once told me that Tower makes more money from selling in-store display space and other co-promotions than from selling CDs themselves. I find that a little hard to believe, but if anyone has real, compelling numbers on this, I’d be glad to share them.