Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

Text me the location of this book

From Casey Bisson: text this to me:

Adam Brin of Tricollege Libraries explained that the “text this to me” feature he built to send location information about items in the library catalog as text messages to a user’s cell phone is being used as many as 60 times a day. That was the news I needed to decide to offer the feature in PSU’s Scriblio implementation.

You can see this in action at the Plymouth State University library.

If I were a patron (oh right, I am a patron) I'd suggest adding an "email this to me" too with the same short text. My cell phone gets email for free, but I have to pay for SMS. Hmmm...I'll bet that it's within scope of a Greasemonkey script to do this....hmm...or a "twitter this to me".

He's using Clickatell which prices out at $0.06 or so per message sent.

Nice hack! Useful too.

Technorati Tags: library, mobile, sms, superpatron

twitter at your library - what should or could it do?

Ryan Eby just invited me to join the Ann Arbor District Library twitter feed:

http://twitter.com/aadl

He promises event notifications and other newsworthy stuff.

Once upon a time I built a "superpatronbot" that searched the AADL catalog via a Jabber bot - quite reasonably you could build one of these upon Twitter's direct message listings. Useful? Perhaps, especially if I could link a Twitter account to my library card and then be able to twitter

d aadl reserve anatomy of a murder dvd

and have it do a hold on it for me (or return some disambiguator if there were multiple choices).

(Reminder - Library Camp 2008 at the AADL, March 20 2008.)

Technorati Tags: aadl, twitter

Google Analytics and the library web site and catalog

At work (how do librarians say it? MPOW?) we use Google Analytics extensively to analyze the behavior of web sites and the people who use them. I had a call this morning about applying the same tools to library web sites, and it made me start to think about a bunch of stuff that I had been noodling around about but not actually writing up.

There's at least two ways to use analytics tools to help the process of making a better system. One is to understand your user population better, so that you can provide them with things that they are finding you for that they're not finding on your site; the second is to test and refine the process by which people complete specific tasks that you want them to complete.

Understanding what people do when they get to your web site goes by many names in many closely related fields, depending on what part of the world you live in. (Some acronyms, for style: UX, UXD, HCI, interactive design, perhaps some IA in the mix). From an analytics point of view, there are lots of things you can figure out, but some primary ones I'd guess from a library web site would be simple things like

• how many people are coming to my site
• what pages are they viewing
• how long do they stay on those pages before moving on
• how frequently do they give up on the site entirely
• what search terms are they using to find me
• what geographical area are they coming from

These reports and more are in the standard set of analytical tools that Google Analytics provides right off the bat, and they provide good aggregate information that you can watch over time.

The second slice of the analytics pie is task completion. As a web designer, you set a goal of some task you know that people are trying to do at your site, and create the path ("funnel") of events that lead up to that goal. (e.g. the goal might be to register for a class, and first you have to hit three pages that let you look at class listings, select a class, confirm a time, and get a thank you note). You configure this path through the system as a goal, and then you can track which % of visitors complete that goal and which if any of those completion paths come unusually from particular search terms, referral sites, or the like. You might answer questions like

• How many people registering for story time give up before they click OK
• When someone reserves a book on line, do they get it from search or browsing?
• How many people give up in the middle of the "contact us" form?
• When someone types "hours" into the search box, do they find our hours page?

Measurements like these are practical if and when you have a flexible enough system to actually make changes to improve the results, and when you have enough results to make a difference. Depending on the organization, it may mean that you work on the "web site" part of your system first or earlier, leaving the "catalog" part of your site in the special circle of the 198x version of design that it came in on.

----

Depending on which state or country you live in, patron browser behavior on some parts of your library web site may be transactions that are protected by law with specific privacy and data retention requirements. Implement with care.

Technorati Tags: analytics, library

Squirrel Hill branch of the Pittsburgh Library

On our Thanksgiving trip to Pittsburgh we stopped in at the Squirrel Hill branch library. It's constructed in a parking garage, and before it was renovated it was functional but not in the slightest bit lovely. Now it's lovely, really lovely with a well lit glass area in the front overlooking the street to read in, and a nice kids area near the back..

The Pittsburgh area libraries were redesigned by a team from Maya Design. I had seen the presentation of these ideas before and talked to Paul Gould about them. What was fascinating was to see these high design ideals in practice smashed up against the vernacular design of libraries by non-librarians who occupy parts of the space in the library.

Where this was most clear was at the back entrance, where the local Friends of the Library had a book sale. Instead of clear oval signage there was a jumbled box of books, and shelved old books for sale on shelves marked with masking tape. In an ordinary library this would not be anything out of the ordinary, but there had clearly been so much work done to change the signs that it was a quite jarring transition. It's almost as if the space needed to have some transition between the street and the library that could be occupied in a sensible way without it having to be kept shiny and neat.

Mashups: what happened?

The Krafty Librarian, a medical librarian in Ohio, asks what happened to library mashups

I recently read where the Journal of Biomedical Informatics recently had a call for papers for their special issue on Semantic Biomedical Mashups. I look forward to reading it when it comes out. However, this has me thinking. Where are all the library mashups? Talis had the Mashing up the Library competition last year, but I haven't seen any information on it for this year. The Talis Mashing of the Library competition boards are silent. The last post was made by David Rothman over 27 weeks ago. The Second OCLC Research Software Contest ran from July 1, 2006 through September 2006, however I haven't heard anything about it this year.

Here's some possible answers, but by no means all of them.

People building book finding systems started building in things into their tools rather than having to wait for users to mash things together. LibraryThing has scooped up a bunch of good ideas, and Book Burro continues to make almost all of my earlier fussing around with Greasemonkey unnecessary. When software developers listen to the feedback loop from their customers, it's not so necessary for those folks to write code to get their ideas in play.

Library systems are woeful in general for being easily reachable by ordinary mortals, in part because the book finding systems in them are designed primarily as hermetically sealed units with proprietary and inward-facing programming interfaces. So there aren't a lot of hooks to hook in on.

People are lazy, and when they've suitably scratched the mashup itch to solve the problems they see around them, they go off to the next thing (twitter, facebook, etc).

(hm, is there a super-easy twitter library mashup just waiting to happen? rss feed of something + twitterfeed? can't do every new book, but perhaps some subset...cookery? knitting? hmm)

Mostly, though, these sort of things are just happening (and much more so than in 2005 or 2006), and it's not notable that it happens to be a mashup - the notable part is that library directors are blogging, library patrons are writing book reviews, and the like. Perhaps the next steps are micro-steps, things like storytime hours being a one-click add to your calendar using a tool like IBM's Operator plugin for Firefox.

Public library, open source catalog: Michigan Evergreen

from the Michigan Evergreen blog:

Welcome! The Michigan Library Consortium and Grand Rapids Public Library are working together to develop a shared library system using the open source ILS software, Evergreen. We will use this blog to keep the Michigan library community updated on the progress of our Evergreen project.

Currently, we are working to select an initial group of public libraries for the pilot group. We hope to have the pilot group selected before the end of the year.

Please feel free to post your questions and comments to this blog. We are interested to hear your input!

Go, urgently.

Technorati Tags: library, evergreen, mlc, michigan, pines, grand-rapids

A challenge: build a Firefox search box for your online book finding system

Two years ago Matt Hampel built a Firefox search box plugin for the Ann Arbor District Library catalog. I use it all the time, and since then I've also added a similar search interface the Michigan-wide MeLCAT catalog.

My expectation is that it could be very easy to build one of these things for every single book finding system out there, even if it's not currently easy. The search box interface in Firefox is simple enough (a very short standardized script to install), and therefore a generator that builds these scripts based on some prior knowledge and a few simple parameters should be easy to do.

In the spirit of Jon Udell's Library Lookup project, I'd like to build a system for building these things for yourself.

Some research brings up this:

Lifehacker: Make your own Firefox site search plug-in:

This easy tip just streamlines this process: all you need to do is navigate to the Firefox plugins directory, save a simple text file, and then restart Firefox. Your plugin will show up in your Firefox drop-down engines - and you can do it for any site you search on a regular basis.

That documents a process for Firefox 1.1. The 2.0 process changed, so it's harder. But the comments unearthed this plugin:

Firefox Add-ons: Add to search bar

Make any pages' search functionality available in the Search Bar (or "search box")...

Just make a right click in a search field and choose "Add to Search Bar..."

NOW: Screencast available! If you don't know what to do after installing the extension, have a look at here: http://maltekraus.de/Firefox/search-tools/addtosearchbar-screencast.html

So I installed this and started trying it out. Results:

Remember the Milk: fails to search the right thing.
Google Custom Search Engine (for the Vacuum blog): awesome
Arborwiki: awesome

encouraged by that, I continued on to do the one that prompted me for this: Cindi Trainor, who asked me what I could do for her Voyager catalog at Eastern Kentucky University. The naive "keyword" search failed me (I'm not used to typing in booleans), but the "keyword relevance" search worked just fine. Some screen shots:

After installing the search engine, here's my new search bar:

and after searching, here's the result I get:

looks like a winner!

The search bar plugin is not hard to install - just add it in and restart Firefox. I suspect that once you generate one of these that you could redistribute it to people who didn't have this extension set up, but that detail can stay til the next go -around.

Technorati Tags: eastern-kentucky-university, firefox, firefox-search-bar, plugin, search

Jon Udell on Remixing the Library (GRL2020)

Jon Udell did a talk on remixing the library at the Global Research Library summit.

Abstract: In an online world of small pieces loosely joined, librarians are among the most well qualified and highly motivated joiners of those pieces. Library patrons, meanwhile, are in transition. Once mainly consumers of information, they are now, on the two-way web, becoming producers too. Can libraries function not only as centers of consumption, but also as centers of production?

mentioned in it: Library Lookup, Dune's "guild navigators", "folding space", xISBN, books on an Amazon wishlist available at your library, PatREST, superpatrons, superlibrarians, community photo aggregation, community calendar aggregation, libraries vs. newspapers as local information sources, community crime data, geocoding, Many Eyes, libraries as physical space, libraries in the mall, libraries as centers of production.

(sounded like an awesome talk - much to think about - much to do)

Technorati Tags: udell, judell, grl2020, library, arborparents

Ann Arbor District Library Developer Blog

The folks who do the software development at the Ann Arbor District Library have started a developer blog.

Welcome to the AADL Developer Blog! Software Development is a big part of what we do here at AADL, and this section of aadl.org is the place to keep up with our new features, see what our developers are working on, and find out what kind of tools we're playing with.

We also have open-source software that we've developed available for download, and you can find that here. Please feel free to comment on our posts or contactus if you have any other questions, and thanks for your interest

Recent blog postings include creating custom content types in Drupal, Eli Neiburger's talk on choosing games for your library , the development of the Library Lego League, and a sonnet regarding library card renewal alerts for III.

A tragedy! Your AADL card
Has now expired, and you must renew.
Just keeping track of all this stuff is hard,
And each new thing is one more thing to do.

Technorati Tags: aadl, annarbor, michigan, drupal, games, eli-neiburger, lego, iii, innovative-interfaces

Espresso Book Machine demo at NYPL's SIBL

pulled straight from PR Web w/o comments:

New York, NY (PRWEB) June 21, 2007 -- The first Espresso Book Machine™ (“the EBM”) was installed and demonstrated today at the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL). The patented automatic book making machine will revolutionize publishing by printing and delivering physical books within minutes. The EBM is a product of On Demand Books, LLC (“ODB” - www.ondemandbooks.com), the company founded by legendary publishing executive Jason Epstein and business partner Dane Neller, who joined SIBL’s Kristin McDonough for a private event there to speak about the EBM’s potential impact on the future of reading and publishing.

The Espresso Book Machine will be available to the public at SIBL through August, and will operate Monday- Saturday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The New York Public Library's Science, Industry and Business Library is located at 188 Madison Avenue (at 34th Street).

It makes you wonder a little bit about the cost per delivered book done this way compared to inter-library loan - I don't have all of those numbers in front of me to compare and I suspect it changes from library to library depending on how automated their ILL system is.

Technorati Tags: annarbor, sibl, nypl, superpatron