a brief thought on the 80/20 rule

This article from Inside Higher Ed doesn't specifically mention information resources, but it got me thinking about a study I read earlier this year about Wikipedia being around 80% right in a given subject area.

If that's true, it's another potential data point explaining why traditional reference sources are getting spanked.

the wave of the present

Kind of old news at this point, but ACS going online-only is still news.

If not exactly unexpected. At my university, science faculty and students had been asking pretty much since I started here (and probably before) when we'd be getting core publications like Science and Nature online. (We now do, after considerable budget reshuffling.) We'd been getting ACS's journals online for quite awhile, and I can't remember the last time I saw anyone looking at a scientific publication other than American Scientist in print.

If ACS passed the cost savings of this move on to its subscribers? THAT would be news.

Notes on the invisible library

One of the things I think about a lot is how the library is changing as the physical facility decouples from the collections it has traditionally housed. In my own personal taxonomy these thoughts group under the heading "Invisible Library", largely because I occasionally encounter students who use the library without knowing it--discovering a journal we subscribe to while using Google, for example. I gave a presentation on campus around this topic last fall and one thing that came very clear to me is that, somehow, we have to stop treating our digital resources in a way equivalent to our physical resources. Publishers do this, but libraries do, too, and it's in danger of killing us.

An article in the latest Journal of Academic Librarianship addresses this issue, adding a third dimension: namely, the people providing library services. It also highlights the phenomenon I mention: patrons can discover library resources through avenues other than the library, and often do. (This is one reason why it would be really nice to somehow handle library patron authentication at the vendor's end, rather than the library's. If there's a nice big banner across the top of the e-journal index page that says "SUBSCRIPTION PROVIDED BY PACIFIC LUTHERAN UNIVERSITY", does it matter whether they got there through the library website or through Google? I submit that it does not.)

A lot of what it talks about here--transformation of library space, digitization of information resource, and a service emphasis on outreach, information literacy, and value-added technology--is already happening; according to long-range plans at some institutions, by fits and starts at others. Some of the technological dimension was addressed in my MLIS program, especially the information architecture side, and some of the Web development and resource management components. But much more, such as data mining, scripting, and technology-dependent aspects of information use (I've been asked how to make charts in Excel so many times in the past month that I've lost count) was not.

The article makes it sound like MLIS programs should become computer science lite degrees, and I'm not entirely convinced that they shouldn't. I love our IT crew, but if certain parts of what we do pass into their domain, it'll be frustrating for them, tragic for us, and a loss to the institution as a whole.

And the MPAA continues its slide into irrelevance

MPAA says teachers should videotape monitors, not rip DVDs.

I think they're actually serious.

Jason Griffey's Top 5

This is actually from December, but check out Jason Griffey's TechSource post on the top 5 most influential technologies of 2008.

As I said there, it interests me that three of the five are devices--hardware.

The Arresting Image

Like a lot of librarians and writers (I happen to be both), I have a habit of privileging text over image. Partly it's upbringing, partly it's preference; however vivid and absorbing an image, I'm habitually more drawn to text, both for information and for entertainment.

In the past month, though, I've twice been pointed to the Boston Globe's The Big Picture. As MediaShift puts it, the Big Picture is "a large-format photo-blog" that "has created a way to display powerful images in a user-friendly manner". Simply put, it does this by making the images really, really large, and captioning them. The result is beyond attention-getting; it's far more absorbing than the images that typically accompany online newspaper stories, which often seem to be stuck in as an afterthought, or a way to balance the page layout. (Some of these, to be fair, link to larger pop-up versions of themselves--the Big Picture's images are still larger, though.)

This week I'm thinking a lot about the presentation of information, as my library website is about to go through a minor bit of redesign. We won't be changing the site architecture, but we will be doing some aesthetic rearranging. A few months back I asked, here and elsewhere, for examples of library websites that showed particularly good design. The response was mostly resounding silence. Library websites tend to be ugly, for the same reason that a lot of online newspaper sites are just the print version ported to the Web, often to a visually cluttered result: we're not used to thinking about how to make what we offer appealing to the eye in this medium. Larger monitors help; I read online a lot more since I got my 17-inch Macbook. But you can't count on that, not with mobile technologies taking off the way they are.

Now that I've been in the library field a few years, I'm thinking seriously about what aspects of the field interest me, since there's not enough time to try or do everything even in this little disciplinary slice of the world. We pay a lot of lip service to the necessity of good online service, especially usability, but rarely talk about what that means in terms of aesthetics and presentation. The Big Picture shows why these things are important.

Design on my mind

Last fall, a group of students in a market research class did a research project for our reference department. It was the sort of thing that we'd wanted to do for awhile, but lacked the wherewithal: surveying literature and students to gauge perceptions and get ideas and recommendations regarding our service. One advantage to being at a university is that you have all this brainpower at your disposal--not just the (considerable) faculty brainpower, but the students too, to whom you can provide opportunities for class projects and learning.

Anyway, among the recommendations--several of which we are implementing--was a redesign of the library website. I was a little tempted to skip this one at first, since we just did a redesign a couple of years ago: it was my first major project after starting here.

But I have to admit that while our library website is pretty good from an organizational and IA perspective, the design is, well, less visually interesting than it could be. And as I started looking at other library websites to get some ideas, I saw that for all we talk about the importance of making our Web presence engaging, easy to use, maybe even (dare I say it?) a little bit fun, most library websites--not to put too fine a point on it--suck.

I've never been a Web designer and have only a smattering of development experience, but I've been on the Web since 1995 and to be honest, most websites suck. Why is this so hard to get right?

Well, for one thing, there are a lot of different elements that go into making a good website. As librarians, we're really good at organizing information--that is, after all, a cornerstone of our profession--but most of us are not designers and we have an ongoing problem with presentation, which also manifests in our instructional settings and the physical layout of our buildings. A library doesn't have to look like a nightclub, and our websites need to resemble neither Google nor Facebook. But in addition to being well organized and functional, they should also be well designed.

This isn't only or even principally about aesthetics. I've seen some beautiful websites whose designs are entirely unsuitable for libraries--but I've also seen some exemplifying principles that library websites would do well to emulate. CSS Zen Garden provides plenty of examples of both, and is especially useful because it shows how many different ways you can display the same content. Some of those displays would work very well with the kind of content libraries provide.

So for the next while I'm going to be thinking about design. In a way, it's easier this time around because I know that the underlying organization of my library's website is solid, which wasn't necessarily the case before. It's also worth thinking about design as distinct from (though obviously necessarily related to) content, information architecture, technological feasibility, and implementation.

If you're contemplating a similar project, the best suggestion I can make at this point is to look beyond other library websites. Most of them suck, and most of them suck in the same ways, for a reason.

Another shift in the sea: CS Monitor going online

In a way, I'm surprised it took this long for a major newspaper to shift to primarily online. Even when I was getting a printed paper, I typically took the weekly one because I haven't had time to read a paper every day for years (whereas it's easy to dip into a news site for a few minutes in a break from work or during lunch). And I've been seeing this shift with research journals, too; it's been going on for years, of course, but for more and more publications, scholarly and non, online is becoming the principal rather than the alternative publishing venue. (In the case of scholarship, often with prices to match. Unfortunately.)

I'm sure that all the national dailies are trending this way. I'm also sure that none of them wanted to be the first to jump. I find it interesting that even the Monitor is saying that it basically has to do this:

"Changes in the industry - changes in the concept of news and the economics underlying the industry - hit the Monitor first," given its relatively small size and the complex logistics required for national distribution, Mr. Wells said. "We are sometimes forced to be an early change agent."

And so it goes...