If Amazon sucked like our old OPAC. To be fair, this Innovative version is pretty ancient. Funny? Yes. Accurate? Not entirely. [thanks marlene]
Tag: ui
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.
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.
Accessibility in books, websites, libraries and your mind.
I have been reading a lot of books about accessible design lately. This started around the time that I got sent this story about the National Library for the Blind in Norway and some of the design flaws that make it very hard for the visually disabled to get into, much less use. The Vermont Technical College has a lot of these books on access. Sadly, I am one of the only people to have checked them out in the last decade. As an aside, I think at this point I would have a very hard time going back to a library where they didn’t have datestamps in the back of the book. I think libraries keeping circulation info “secret” — not on purpose, but by ILS system design — is a decline in information-sharing with patrons, and a shame. Here are the books I have read, with links to my reviews.
Beautiful Barrier Free
Access by Design
Design for Dignity: Studies in Accessibility
And, of course, let’s remember how to make our web sites accessible. Jacob Nielsen has come out with lists of top ten web design mistakes as well as top ten weblog design mistakes. Check to see if you make any of these mistakes. I recently wrote a note to ALA’s webmaster commenting on the lack of ALT or title tags on the ALA Midwinter Meeting page. It’s a nice looking page, but information is imparted through lots of graphics, with no alternate navigation. Usually there is a set of text links at the bottom of the page if they use images for navigation. This is what someone viewing the page with a text-only browser would see. I cannot stress enough: this is the conference information page for the largest library association in the world. If we can’t follow our own rules about accessibility, how can we expect others to?
What We Want, The OPAC Manifesto
Andrew Pace reminds me that I used to have a wiki, way back when. This wiki was a place where, among other things, I had a roomshare page for ALA as well as the OPAC Manifesto which was going to be an article in Searcher Magazine. However, the final version was not quite Searcher material, so I shelved it temporarily while I thought about wikifixing and promptly forgot about it. The OPAC Manifesto is back for your viewing [though not editing] pleasure. Thanks very much to people who helped with it. Feel free to link or republish in any not-for-profit venture, just cite it and credit it.
update: for those of you who missed this topic before, the manifesto was set up on a wiki so that anyone could add or edit ideas on it. The intro and outro are mine, the rest was collaboratively built.