Just finished reading Advice on Establishing a Library by Gabriel Naudé, written in 1627, it has some still very relevant advice. The page references are to the 1950 University of California Press edition.

While it is not every year that a king or poet is born, the same can be said of a librarian. (2)

“It must be said also that there is nothing more to the credit of a library than that every man finds in it what he seeks, having failed to find it elsewhere; since it may be laid down as a maxim that there is no book whatsoever, be it never so bad or disparaged, but may in time be sought for by some[.]” (17)

Open our libraries to receive those who have written on little-known subjects. Include the “trivial or unusual, interesting or neglected, difficult or easy, since one may” apply to books what is said of the uncommon, “Scare things give pleasure, and therefore we value first-fruits from the orchard.” quoting Martial, Book  IV, No. 29, 3-4 (25)

The value of books and the ideas they contain should not measured by age. Older should not be preferred or revered over newer and vice versa. (33, 40)

“A library will never be much benefited if that which is collected with so much pains and industry should be lost for want of care.” (47)

“We neglect nothing which is of any account and which may be of use either to ourselves or others.” Despising that which we see has trivial  may mean loosing rare collections of the most curious things in the library. (48)

Reduce the expense of binding and ornamentation, use the money to buy more books. Books do not cease to be useful without “splendid and sumptuous” appearance. (52)

It is not a library if the public are not allowed to “reap any benefit.” (74)

The title Librarian is honorable & noble. (76)

All things should be valued “according to the balance of benefit and use that may be derived from them,” this is particularly true of books which must be available for public use. (78)

New Year, New Fish

I’m not sure I like the phrase “user experience (UX)” to describe what happens when people come into the library. I don’t really like the word patron either, it seems rather clinical. Anyway Steven Bell‘s point is that libraries should think about designing user experiences that results in our patrons feeling a personal bond with the place. Without the place, or the library in our case, the user would have a sense of loss.

Users want ease, familiarity, simplicity and quality, in that order, in their UX.

Be memorable [in a good way].

A couple of ideas:

• expand the Summer “Just Because You’re Here” idea
• some kind of prizes at Reference – best question, 27th question of the month

I want to use the phrase”Hit the Wall” for something. I tell patrons that when sending them to the restroom. “Go down the hall, when you hit the wall turn left”

Just for fun: Penrose Staircase. As a game on WIRED

Bell, Steven, and Josh Hadro. “Fish Market 101: Why Not a Reference User Experience?.” Library Journal (November 16, 2010): 6-7. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed January 6, 2011).

Going Mobile

Just watched a webinar “Going Mobile” from Higher Ed Experts. Here’s what I thought worth remembering:

• Constraints Never Come First – create, not convert [this means you can’t just shrink your website]
• Focus on Context, Goals and Needs – tasks, locale information
• Can’t Support Everything – cover as much as possible, avoid deliberately excluding users
  • Webkit Advanced works on iPads, iPhones
  • Webkit Old still need for other OS (Palm)
• Educate and Embrace Others – but don’t wait; don’t expect perfection and everyone to accept
• Keep It Simple – make it manageable
• Types of content
  • Informative
  • Locale – maps to buildings, maps of building, parking
  • Utility/Productivity – events, directory
• Widgets – Yahoo Blueprint, Flash Lite
• Phonegap
• Brian Fling, Mobile Design and Development
• Possible content for our mobile site
  • Directory – offices, people
  • Admission status
  • Library
    • Hours
    • Airpac
    • Questions
  • Events
  • News
    • Law school
    • UGA
    • Athens
  • Class schedules
  • Point allocation
  • Registration

Using My Home

Read, rather browsed, Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed by the usability guru Jakob Nielsen (2002). Some things to remember:

• Don’t use word “website” when talking about subsites/pages/depts. “Website” is the whole. people may think they’re moving away
• Homepage should look different
• About Us – one place
• Press/News – one place
• Feedback – who does it go to and what will they do
• Intranet should be more for us, work space, information clutters public space
• Privacy policy if we are gathering information
• Users scan rather than read text on screens
• Don’t require users to register particularly for basic information
• Full of words – too much detail in verbose text blocks
• Dense layout
• [We’re missing the power of the purple button]
• Heavy graphic content should be balanced with simple core elements
• Text must be information of value, expensive real estate
• Have well organized categories

I’m Socializing

The Georgia Library Media Association present Wednesday webinars. Today’s webinar was “The Social Library with Cliff Landis” who is at Georgia State University. He started by talking about Dunbar’s number which is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150. (from Wikipedia). With social tools this number does ratchet up.

Other points to remember:

• We need to set-up Google alerts to monitor what people say about the library
• Services must work well before adding technology. Technology probably won’t fix something that isn’t working.
• Use the social sphere to be social. Should we think about using our library students to see what other students think about us?
• Users want website to change, dynamic content. There is no reason to go to the website if nothing changes.
• Read blogs to stay current. Recommendations:
  • Michael Stephens “Taming the Web“
  • Buffy Hamilton “The Unquiet Library“
  • Sarah Houghton-Jan “Librarian in Black“
• GO MOBILE!
  • Libraries are behind the times
  • There are many services which can be made mobile before we launch a mobile accessible website
  • It’s a Mobile World, Where do you fit : delighting library users with creative mobile services
  • Mobile emulators
  • M-Libraries Wiki

• PEW Report – The Future of Social Relations

Going to the Market

Yesterday I watched an ACRL program Marketing Ideas That Work in Academic Libraries: Pecha Kucha Presentation. Six short presentations on successful marketing programs in a variety of libraries.

By the way Pecha Kucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. The format is now used for just about every kind of industry including libraries. The concept is simple, 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds, for a presentation slightly over 6.5 minutes long. It’s a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

What I took away from the webinar:

• One of the institutions had the marketing program in the business school develop a campaign as a class project. As part of the survey the library learned that the concept of “reference” really meant nothing to the students. So they renamed the reference desk the “Information Desk” and promoted their personal research help.
  • These were undergraduates but are ours more knowledgeable? Probably not as many students have little research experience as undergraduates.
• Were able to get the faculty to at least refer the students to the library if they had any kind of research/drafting assignments.
  • What can we do to remind our faculty of our services and how we can help their students with their papers?
• Developed a reading campaign on an environmental topic, “Read Green”. Over the course of the term the group read 3 books and viewed 2 documentaries.
  • Could we sponsor a series or program on a theme?
    • Environmental, Land Use, Criminal Justice
    • Partner with other campus departments
    • Who would be in our community
      • Just the law school, UGA, Athens
• Take a “Bookmobile” to the cafeteria with on the spot check-out
  • Could we have a selection of books for check-out during our coffees?
  • Could we make the coffees more cafe like?
• Wine and book pairing reception for the faculty
  • Like the wine and food pairings you’d see at a restaurant or wine store
  • Fund raising possibility?
• One library developed a photo campaign with student spokes models for the library (holding Ask signs). They were then used on the web site, bookmarks, etc. The spokes models even have their own Facebook page.
• LibraryPalooza – a great campaign that got a lot of students involved. This was done during orientation
  • Not really appropriate for us. We don’t actually have to work to get them into the library at least not initially. We do have a challenge getting them to use our resources including us.

Building Information

I bought the first edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web in 1998 when it was published. My copy is even signed by one of the authors Louis Rosenfeld, although I can not remember the circumstances. We’ve ordered the most recent edition published in 2007. Things have really changed in ten years because the new edition is 300 pages longer, 504 vs. 202.

The one thought I want to remember from my copy is: “If a hierarchy is too broad and shallow, users are faced with too many options on the main menu and are unpleasantly surprised by the lack of content once they select an option.” p.38.

Neteracy

The Technology of Law, Bernard J. Hibbitts, 102 Law Libr. J. 101 (2010).

Neteracy – internet literacy; people learning to work, think, and express themselves in cyberspace.

Teaching our students neteracy (as much as we can ). Students may be net-native but they are not necessarily net-literate. They carry lots of gadgets and use many applications but there is so much “they don’t know, a great deal they take for granted and, in the absence of instruction, a great deal they haven’t tried or though through. On top of this, they’re hit with a style of law school pedagogy that largely delegitimizes what they do know and stuffs them back into the boxes of traditional learning.” p.106.

Reading on the internet is different from but similar in many ways to reading printed text.

• Gathering – looking in the right places. Students tend to think Google/Wikipedia do it all. Fail to look for encyclopedias, archives, blogs, social networks
• Filtering – challenge what they see, where does it come from, when, style of presentation. [Questions they tend not to ask consistently with “classic” legal materials print or electronic]
• Scanning – quickly and effectively with understanding and retention [Quality of the presentation is important, see Writing]
• Navigating – multi-directionality of web versus linear nature of print; need to have more of a sense of where you are going, how to get there, and how to get back [need tools to track research, save for later reading, organize into different trails]
• Comprehended – comprehension may be a shifting plan as “information on web pages and elsewhere continually appears, changes, and disappears. In other words neterate comprehension is pointedly dynamic, not definitive, and readers need to be able to cope with this kind of fluidity.” p.108.
• Evaluated – does comprehended information seem accurate, trustworthy, need verification. The researcher must accept responsibility for the critical analysis of sources.

Writing meaningful text for the web is very different than writing for print, particularly as compared to “legal writing”. Students need to learn to exploit the web for serious professional purposes.  Web pages are scanned so

• verbal constructions should be short
• few subordinate clauses
• points visually highlighted or bulleted
• important information up from as in newpaper lead paragraph style
• effective hyperlinking, limit digression or worst getting lost
• Design (layout, colors, font types) becomes more critical online and not usually thought about in print
• Construction/organization – breaking down large amounts of information into appropriate categories

JURIST.com – edited by students in UPitt course. Hibbitts believes law librarians are the ones to develop environments in which law students and new lawyers can develop their neteracy. Creating subject specific blogs where lawyers provide a service to the community and enhance their reputation as well as that of their firm.

I need to explore my idea of training students on use/application of online tools to build a professional portfolio. Taking briefs or papers and repackaging for the web, highlighting skills learned in class, through volunteer work, internships.

Mystery Solved

The third and final  webinar in the series “Exploring the Mystery of Library Instruction: New Thinking for Your Information Literacy Initiative” was today. The specific title is “The Blended Librarian’s Approach to Rethinking Instruction and Redesigning the Information Literacy Initiative”

Things I want to think about:

• Can we do the blended librarian thing in our setting? Part of the role of the BL is integrating “the library” into teaching and learning. If they won’t let you into the classroom can we be part of the teaching?
• Once we understand the mystery we keep doing the same thing. We have to seek out new mysteries. Innovation should be common.
• Visit The Blended Librarian
• Read the 2010 Horizon Report for discussions of trends which include mobile devices and e-books.
• What are we adding to a world where information is everywhere and easier to get? How can we demonstrate our impact? We must improve the skills of the people who ask for help but what about the rest of them? If they share what they learn with other then our reach does extend.
• Read article by Char Booth, June/July 2010 American Libraries
• ADDIE Model – generic process used to build effective training and performance support tools.
• Blended Librarian Adapted ADDIE Model (BLAAM) – design thinking
  • Assess
    • 1. Identify the problem
    • 2. Brainstorm solutions
    • 3. Learn/practice with content management capabilities
  • Design
    • 4. Design library resources for  seminars
    • 5. Create and/or utilize library resources
    • 6. Develop strategy for implementation
  • Develop
    • 7. Incorporate faculty/staff & training/learning
  • Deliver
    • 8. Implement
  • Measure
    • 9. Evaluate
• New mysteries of blended librarianship
  • What lies beyond integration into courseware?
  • Can we do more to explore the challenge of assessment?
  • Embedding library resources into learning management systems: away to reach Duke undergrads at their points of need, Emily Daly
• Remember our wicked problems [“Wicked problem” is a phrase used in social planning to describe a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Characterized by ambiguity, shifting information.]
  • are we making a difference; are they learning what we say they are; do they become lifelong learners; are they academically successful
• Some products to maybe look at:
  • Symtext Liquid Textbook
  • MERLOT.org
  • Sakai
  • Moodle
  • E-textbook devices – look at the Kno Tablet (so beautiful).
• Web enhanced/blended courses are a trend in education

I’ve Managed to Read This

I’ve just finished How to Manage a Law School Library: Leading Librarians on Updating Resources, Managing Budget, and Meeting Expectations (Aspatore Books, 2008). Here are some things I want to remember:

Students view the library as a haven, a refuge, a home away from home. It should be comfortable and inviting. Our mission statement really isn’t a mission but declarations about us:

The Law Library provides resources and expertise to support the instructional mission of the School of Law and the scholarly research of the law faculty.  The Law Library is also an important source of legal information for the university community, attorneys, and private citizens.

Our mission should be to create a library such that our students wouldn’t want to go anywhere else. They should brag to friends at other schools about “their” library. The mission statement should capture the sense of the library’s place and its value within the community (p. 97).

Some of the authors suggested that primary materials in print are unnecessary, particularly reporters which are shunned in the “real” world (law firms) (p. 30). ABA Standard 606 should not be used as justification for continuing subscriptions to print reporters. The standards ensure a certain degree of uniformity; they are helpful but increasingly limited benchmarks with which to compare ourselves to others (p. 97). We should focus on secondary sources which are easier to use in print and monographs which are not available in print.

Our services should be tailored to maximize ease of use of the library. One library immediately purchases any book requested by a faculty member or student (p. 52). Sounds a little like the hotel that lets employees spend money to solve problems or Nordstrom which also allows employees do what is necessary to make the customer happy.

Let’s not participate in the “my library is bigger game”, meeting the needs of our patrons is the goal (p. 66). Size is not a determinant of overall quality. Rather “how close are we to the center of the intellectual life of the law school?” (p. 90).

“Suaveness of the student [re: technology] is a self-induced misconception.” They have a false understanding of what is online, a false sense of their research abilities (p. 72).

We need to transition from a collection-based institution to a service-based institution (p. 85). Organize our efforts around roles the students occupy in their three years:

• 1L – learning language of the law, citations, test taking
• 2L & 3L – clinical experiences, moot courts, journal staff, research assistants, summer associate, writing seminar papers, job hunting

The great libraries will “blend great collections with services necessary to return control, confidence, and understanding to their patrons.” (p. 91). The new law schools and their libraries are able to try innovations more easily than large, historic libraries (p. 111). Let’s pretend to be a new library sometime.

At UW Penny Hazelton has “closed days” for the staff. The day after the end of each term is a work day for the staff but they are closed to patrons. The staff are encouraged to clean off their desks, weed files and emails, finish complicated projects.