The Creative Librarian

The Small Business Social Media Cheat Sheet

Laura — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:29:39 +0000

Pretty good description of the differences between the major networks to let you decide where to start.

Flowtown – Social Media Marketing Application

Library License

Laura — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 02:34:26 +0000

Grant libraries non-commercial access to copyrighted material on a defined time horizon. Content producers could add a Library License to the terms of their publishing contracts. via Library License.

The big publishers would be unlikely to pick it up but it would give smaller, independent content owners an option for allowing libraries to use their work. It's still in the discussion stage so comments would be useful.

Publishing Scholarly Articles with WordPress

Laura — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:38:58 +0000

WordPress is one of, if not the most, popular pieces of software for blogging and managing websites, mostly because of the ease of installation. But customizing it can be a difficult and technical process.

Annotum is a WordPress theme built for publishing research papers. It has all of the functionality built-in for multiple authors to collaborate, edit, review, and import and export in the NLM-DTD format. It creates the correct document structure by default and has visual editors for figures, references, tables, and equations. Because it creates an Article post type, you can still use the same installation as a regular blog.

It is an available theme on WordPress.org, so you can just create a blog and choose it. If you host your own WordPress blog, you can download it from the depository and customize how it looks with a child theme.

Google Résumé Builder

Laura — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:42:19 +0000

Build your résumé and get started on your future.

Use Google Docs to build a professional-looking résumé that summarizes your experience, education and skills.

This guide was written for veterans but it would be useful for anyone.

The Impact of Mobile Technology on Health Sciences Libraries

Laura — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:27:13 +0000

The interesting thing about the movement to mobile technology is in many ways it is simply an extension of the changes brought about by the Internet, just made greatly more complicated by the larger variety of devices and the almost infinite number of physical contexts (in the car, sitting in front of the TV, walking to class).

The Impact of the Internet

That said, the Internet may have had an even bigger impact on health sciences libraries than any other kind. The easy access to research citations from PubMed created a demand for full online access from the existing health science students and professionals. Meanwhile new students can’t imagine a world without immediate gratification and they don’t want to. They may be sitting in the middle of the library but if the information isn’t available on their computers they aren’t interested in it.

What Are Mobile Devices?

The first problem with studying mobile technology is defining what constitutes a mobile device. It started with PDAs by Palm and Blackberry for busy people with a lot of money. But now it seems everyone has at has least one device that can be considered mobile. Laptops are full-fledged computers that can be carted around from place to place and used to log on to the Internet and therefor library resources. Netbooks are stripped down laptops pretty much only good for Internet surfing and Office programs. Tablets, like the iPad are like netbooks but possibly even less capable. And even the most able smart phones are far more limited than anything else if only by the size of their screen. All of these devices not only have different abilities, but different operating systems which may or may not be compatible with the library’s products. Android devices and netbooks are based on two different versions of Unix which has never been a priority for vendors. All iPhones and iPads use the same operating system but have different abilities. It’s a moving target, with new more capable devices being released every year. The latest version of the iPhone technically has a greater resolution than paper! There are persistent rumors that the next iPad will have the same resolution. The same patron will often use different devices depending on their physical context expecting the library’s resources to respond appropriately.

Implications for Libraries

How have these changes affected library services? While increasing total usage, traditional statistics from the physical world have often gone down, making it look like the library is being used less overall. There have been opportunities for new services. Mobile technology gives us the ability to provide evidence-based point-of-care health information to professionals that supports improved patient care and safety. For the patients themselves, who are often patrons of ours as well, mobile technologies facilitate improved communication by enabling appointment reminders, and giving patients better contact capabilities with their health care providers in order to ask questions about their medications and care. Many of our services seem to rely on the vendors from whom we buy access to information, and these vendors can be slow to adapt to new technologies, waiting to see what becomes popular and taking their time to plan and implement solutions. This can be a good thing. During my first week in a health sciences library I (young & dumb) was part of an MD Consult demonstration. I didn’t think it would be particularly worthwhile, because it seemed to duplicate so much of what we already had. Of course it became one of our most popular offerings, the convenience making it extremely useful for both the practicing physicians and the students. The problem with relying exclusively on our venders is that the time they take can make us look slow and ineffectual, irrelevant to the lives of our users.

Coping

How do we adjust for these new challenges and opportunities? With a double approach of judicious technological use and creativity. Up till now, most websites have been created at a set size. But there are a large number of resolutions for web browsing these days. Everything from tiny smart-phone screens to HDTVs. And while it’s really annoying trying to browse a huge site on a tiny screen, small sites can look old or just lost on large ones. Fortunately, there are multiple ways to adjust a website for mobile devices. Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS lets you specify how you want your website to look, separate from the HTML so that it can be defined once and kept consistent throughout. CSS3 is the latest version of the standard. There are a lot of useful features introduced, taking the place of bulky and slower-loading image and javascript work-arounds. Media-queries are a new feature of CSS3 that let you design for different screen sizes and switch between them, customizing how your website looks based on the size of the browsing window. Go to http://mediaqueri.es/ to see screenshots of websites using media queries. Click on one of the pictures to go to the live site and play with your window to see the changes in real-time. It’s kind of addictive. Media-queries are certainly not the only way to create a mobile website, although they are one of the easiest. On phone screens, a library website with a lot of content might be better served by cut-down templates that display only the information someone on the go would want. And this is the way most libraries have chosen: They have a full site for desktops and laptops, and a stripped down template for smart phones. The problem that can develop is that netbooks and tablets are in between - the full sites might be too big for their displays, but the stripped down templates almost always show too little, not making good use of their larger screens. The University of California, San Francisco Library is a good example. Their site is nice on full computers and smart phones but on my iPad the mobile site is uncomfortably stretched out and wastes a lot of space while with the full site, the text gets too small to read. A good compromise would be to use media queries to adjust the full website for the smaller screens of the medium-sized devices, as well as providing the special templates for phones. Unfortunately, we don’t always have complete control of our website. Many libraries are expected to use the parent organization’s templates, which don’t always work well with the unique library content like catalog pages and an array of web forms. You can work-around these problems with outside services that have built-in mobile versions like a hosted blog and almost all social networks. While usually you would want to use these services to draw users back to the library website you can also go in the opposite direction, linking out to those services so that mobile users can get a better experience from their sites. It’s not ideal but a decent temporary fix. The other answer to the question of coping is creativity. The wonderful thing about librarians is that we like to share. It’s a good bet that somewhere another library has had a similar problem and talked about their solution in a journal article or blog post. In the case of open-source software, they may have even posted the code for others to adjust and use. Open-source software is software that you can alter as you like and pass along. It’s popular with libraries because of it’s flexibility to meet their needs and because it’s usually free. The most popular one in libraries is probably Drupal, a content management system for managing large and complex websites. The Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) in Ann Arbor Michigan has released several modules they’ve created to integrate their Innovative Interfaces catalog into their Drupal website. These modules have been altered and added to a number of other library websites, creating a community of users who have similar problems and share solutions. By working together like this, librarians can help each other overcome the challenges of how the Internet and it’s many variations are changing the needs of our users.

Rethinking

The other thing we can do is to rethink the role of the website in the library as a whole. Most library websites are an addition that aren’t really integrated with the rest of the library. As the second face to the world (after the physical building) they need to move to become a central part of the library services and a viable place for web users to interact with the organization as a whole and the librarians as individuals. The biggest advantage libraries have over solely Internet-based services like databases or Google is the human touch of the librarians themselves. We need to rethink our approach to bring that to this new area so others can see it.

In Victory for Open-Education Movement, Blackboard Embraces Sharing

Laura — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 03:05:45 +0000

Professors who use Blackboard’s software have long been forced to lock their course materials in an area effectively marked, “For Registered Students Only,” while using the system. Today the company announced plans to add a “Share” button that will let professors make those learning materials free and open online.

The move may be the biggest sign yet that the idea of “open educational materials” is going mainstream, nearly 10 years after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology first began giving away lecture notes online. Blackboard made the change after college officials complained that the company’s software, which more than half the colleges in the country use for their online-course materials, was holding them back from trying open-education projects.

In Victory for Open-Education Movement, Blackboard Embraces Sharing Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education.

GoMo: An Initiative From Google

Laura — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:08:02 +0000

GoMo: An Initiative From Google. Resources for building a mobile website and an emulator to test how it looks on a phone.

Screenfly by QuirkTools — Test Your Website at Different Screen Resolutions

Laura — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:44:56 +0000

Screenfly by QuirkTools — Test Your Website at Different Screen Resolutions. You can do the same thing with various browser plugins but Screenfly saves you the trouble of tracking down the screen sizes of various devices, just put in your URL and choose the name of the device you want to test it on.

The Problems of Creating an Academic Library Website

Laura — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 23:32:32 +0000

Someone recently asked me about the problems faced by academic library websites and I immediately started writing a list. Being a fairly unique part of an organization is difficult enough. But the radical changes in how people access and use information are still ongoing.

What is the Audience?

There are many challenges for academic library websites, starting right at the beginning. If you do research on web design, the first thing all the books say is to define your audience. But who is the audience of the academic library? The students who are the most numerous? The faculty who have been there for years and may have their own research to do? Are the school’s administration and staff unimportant? The school I worked at last was part of a consortium that often shared resources, what about the students, faculty and staff of those schools? Even if you narrow it down to your own school’s faculty and students you’ve got two disparate groups with different needs, technical comfort levels and desires of what the library should provide them. How do you reconcile the differences?

What Content to Post?

The second problem is the content. Libraries by definition have a lot of information, choosing which should go up on the website can be a nightmare. Everyone thinks their pet interest should be on the front page. It’s difficult to refuse because that information usually is important and unique to the library. Figuring out how to organize content so that it’s findable for casual users is a job unto itself.

How to Display the Content?

Then there’s presentation. Many academic libraries are being required to use the parent university’s webpage templates. Which solves the design problem but often complicates the organizational one. As well as having more content than anyone else, libraries have different content like catalog pages and web forms.

What Technologies to Use?

The biggest challenge may be the rapidly changing web itself. When my last library needed a blog, we had to use an outside service not because we didn’t have the knowledge and experience to set up and maintain the software ourselves but because the campus IT department which hosted our servers wouldn’t allow it. With social networks everywhere and new services starting and closing all the time, libraries need to be fast and flexible to try new offerings and move on when needed.

Are There Solutions?

Unfortunately with all if these problems, solutions must be found on a case-by-case basis. You can read articles and blog posts, talk to other librarians who’ve faced the same complications, but in the end organizations and communities vary so much that very little of what works for one will help another. The best we can do is use the experiences of others as ideas and directions for our own problem-solving.

The six data-savvy work personas — Online Collaboration

Laura — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:24:02 +0000

“Historically, we had a centralized librarian — a filter for the organization,” [Merkle] says. “In the past decade, there’s a trend to decentralize research and the role of the corporate library. Many consulting companies, for example, are asking people to do their own work [research]. This adds another level of noise around consistency of how we gather, share, and collaborate.”

… In closing, Merkle said, “We have the tools, but now it’s about the users.”

The six data-savvy work personas — GigaOM.

How can we use these personas to tailor and promote our services?