Blogomancy

Looking at various library web pages, the casual observer will–more often than not–notice a similar style of web design:

• tons and tons of text.

From my work as a library webmaster, I’m pretty sure I’ve hit upon the reasoning behind that so-called ‘style’.

Librarians are big on information, so that obviously plays some part, but I don’t think it’s solely responsible.  Also at fault is the librarians’ desire to make all that information easily accessible.

Unfortunately, that desire–at least in my experience–results in information overload.  The library web page where I work is a good example: when I arrived, it was basically a huge 3-column list of links to various services, databases, sub-pages, &c..

So, a little bit counter-intuitively, the desire to make every thing easily accessible (“Students need to be able to get to it in one click or they won’t bother.”) actually leads to making everything relatively inaccessible–or at least hard to find (Student: “I can’t find what to click on.”)

To make matters worse, the text-links on that old web page were not text, but images.  (This is different from the Image in my title, and is a whole other bag of fresh bloodworms from the fish store.)  This meant web-savvy users of the site were completely unable to quickly find the link they wanted using ctrl-f.

In other words, what the user of the average library website is faced with is a bewildering array of text.

What this means in practical terms is information overload.

That can be avoided by using more images and fewer text–or at least text that is more evenly spaced out on the page.

It’s hard to find a good example in the world of libraries, but fortunately the Library Success Wiki has done some of the work for me.

Case Studies

Case 1:  Henry Madden Library, CSU Fresno

This website is visually appealing, and the minimal amounts of text make it really easy to find what you’re looking for.  This is the very first time I have looked at their web page, and I can immediately see links to journals, articles, the library catalog, the library hours, and other important things.

Especially useful are the “Not sure where to start?”  and “Need help?  Ask!” buttons.

The three-row design splits the website into sections and makes it easier to focus on the information on each one.  The use of graphics AND text in the bottom row makes those links stand out where text alone would probably make them impossible to see.

Case 2: UCLA Library

This site is even more minimalistic than the other, and on the web less is definitely more.  The almost complete lack of text make it easy to focus on the text that is there, helpfully titled “Search and Find”, “Services”, “Libraries and Collections”, and so forth.  The fact that UCLA has avoided library jargon like “Databases” (at least on this page) is good–students will be less confused and more able to find what they need.

The minimalism of the site also allows UCLA to highlight special events and exhibits.  At the time of this posting, there was a very easy-to-spot link to an online collection of Mexican-American music.

Case 3:  Queen’s University Library

This website is different from my other two case studies: unlike them, it does still have a lot of text.  However, the page is well-designed, and has an adequate amount of white space, which allows users to easily spot what they’re looking for.

The use of Javascript to split the information into tabs is a good trick to get more information on the page without cluttering things, although they do have perhaps a bit too much in each of those tabs.  Better would be to redirect users to a sub-page upon clicking for the information.

Regardless, there is plenty of white space, and the page is clearly organized, so you don’t get lost.  The high-contrast blue-on-yellow of the top menu, and the fact that their drop-down menu is sufficiently padded and bordered so that the information doesn’t get lost in the rest of the page, are both nice touches.

So far as bad library web design goes, I don’t even need to post examples–I’m sure everyone knows what I’m talking about.  If you ever find yourself in a position to influence the course of your own library’s web page, please do your patrons a favour: argue for less text, more image, more organization!

While doing some additional research for an article I’m writing about blog use among librarians, I stumbled across this post at Marcus’ World discussing a NY Times article from earlier in the week.

The Times article discusses a project run by Shakespeare Quarterly which, essentially, experimented with bringing peer review into the 21st century.  SQ posted four essays which they had not yet accepted for publication and invited a group of experts to post comments on the article using MediaCommons.

Although this is not quite what I’m interested in with my article–which ties into that Blogs and Journals survey I posted last month–it shows exactly why said survey is relevant.

Especially interesting are the opinions of what the Times refers to as “a small vanguard of digitally adept scholars” who are attempting to rethink “how knowledge is understood and judged.”

Also good to note are the comments of Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University:

“Serious scholars are asking whether the institutions of the academy — as they have existed for decades, even centuries — aren’t becoming obsolete.”

Cohen also believes–and I agree-that scholarly values like “generating discussion, improving works in progress, and sharing information rapidly … are given short shrift” in traditional Peer Review.

This seems to be a common theme, in fact.  Several of the pro-blog articles I’ve found (from way back in 2007/2008–apparently a good year for blog articles) mention the frustrating sloth of traditional peer-reviewed journals.

Of course, not everybody is thrilled with the new idea.  There are the usual nay-sayers, fearing that the open nature of blogs and other digital media will create the destruction of scholarship with its democratic bottom-up approach.

Marcus, on his blog post, notes that this has several ramifications for librarians beyond just getting articles published in new ways.  Unlike other scholarly areas, we also have to worry about:

• teaching students to separate the good from the bad
• archiving born-digital items

and other library-related concerns.

Both Marcus’ post and the NY Times article make for thought-provoking reading, and create an exciting sense of where the profession is going with the web.

The nightmare of moving is finally over, and we are settled into our new apartment.  More or less.

Hopefully this will give me a bit more free time to compose interesting, relevant, and otherwise worth-reading blog posts.

Work is still a little insane, and is likely to become more so once school starts up again.  I’m also hard at work on 2 or 3 articles, and start up school myself on the 31st of the month.

Even if I can’t get back to 3-a-week, I hope I can at least manage 2-a-week on this blog.

[I have hellacious allergies right now due to a ton of dust inhabiting my sinuses courtesy of our still-slightly-ongoing move, so I may be less than coherent.  My apologies.]

The paper proposal I submitted to the 2011 Eaton Science Fiction Conference was accepted!

I will be presenting a 20-minute paper titled “A Citizen of the World: The Problem of Naive Globalization in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.”  It will discuss aesthetic distance, political theory a la Derrida, and subalternity in fiction, all in the context of the apparent-or-real globalization of Science Fiction.

Does that sound exciting or what?  I think Anathem is especially well-suited for the topic (obviously, or I wouldn’t have selected it), dealing as it does with the transmission of data between alternate versions of reality.   Har har.

Seriously, though, the book is quite an interesting test-case for the discussion of Cultural Imperialism and so forth that usually goes on when the word “Globalization” pops up–at least, amongst scholars of literature.

It is my contention that discussions of the globalization of anything automatically exhibit Culturally-Imperialist(?) tendencies.  With literature, this is especially true.

Theorists and texts I will be using to back myself up:

Derrida – Rogues and probably some of his more familiar stuff on deconstruction-in-general.

Spivak – Can the Subaltern Speak?

Timothy Morton – Ecology without Nature.

The Blogs and Journals survey has now ceased. Close to three hundred people responded–thank you all!

The Amazon gift certificate for $10, according to random.org, goes to survey respondent number 232.   The gift card has been delivered by e-mail to this lucky respondent.  Congratulations!

Survey Comments

I would also like to take this opportunity to address the comments I received in the last section of the survey.

• Several people raised questions about ageism with the “How old are you?” question.  I am not really concerned with trying to correlate people’s views on blogs and journals along age boundaries, so no worries there.  That question was included solely to ensure that I was not just getting a bunch of 22-year-old bloggers filling out the survey.  I want to make sure the answers represent at least a slightly wider cross-section of librarians.

• The definition of an “active” blog as 2/week is, I will agree, entirely arbitrary, and probably meaningless.  However, I did not want people who had just created a blog one time two years ago checking that box.  It seemed best to set some kind of definition instead of just saying “active”, but maybe I would have been better off doing that, instead.

• Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media are indeed interesting and useful, but their functionality is irrelevant to the particular questions I wanted to ask here.

Again, thanks for all your feedback!  If you’re interested in knowing the results of the survey or any publications which come out of it, you can subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter in the top-right-hand corner of the site.

If you think the survey was a ridiculous amount of time, please feel free to add your flames and trolling in the comments section below–nothing makes a blog look used more than flaming.

Upon seeing which, many of you will say “… What?” and a few will probably say “Old news.”

MyWHAT?

MySQL, for the first group of people above, is a database program (like MS Access, which most of you will be more familiar with).  MySQL scores over Acecss in a number of areas, which I won’t go into here because it will be sound like an anti-Microsoft rant and there are enough of those on the Internet already.  Well, maybe a little:

Access is fine for programs or applications where you have a small simultaneous user load and are running Windows.  As you can see from this handy Wiki chart, MySQL runs on a lot more operating systems.  It is also faster and handles multi-user access a heck of a lot better.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s the real reason you librarians might be interested in MySQL: it’s open-source, and (as long as you don’t want the Enterprise Edition) is free.  The reason this is important is that a lot of open-source software packages you might want on your web use MySQL over Access.  Here’s just a partial list of such packages:

• WordPress (what I’m using to blog)
• MediaWiki (which you may recognise from Wikipedia )
• phpBB (a popular forum software)
• Evergreen (the open-source ILS)
• Drupal (an open-source content management system)

Essentially: if you’re using open-source software, chances are good that you’re also using MySQL to power that software.

Why Back up?

Most dynamic web applications (like the open-source packages above) do not store data directly to the page like plain ol’ HTML web pages from the early 90s.  Instead, they write that data into the MySQL (or other) database and then use code snippets  to pull the data from the database and display it on the page.  This blog post, for instance, is not stored on an HTML page but in a set of MySQL database tables.

Making SQL backup dumps will ensure that your website data is easily replaceable stays current even in the case of an accidental “drop table” command (which will delete all your data) or an SQL injection attack (which you need to protect against anyway, but redundancy is sometimes a good thing).

Once you have these backup files in a safe location, replacing lost data is as simple as typing in a LOAD command or–even better–clicking the “Restore from SQL Dump” button if you use a Graphical User Interface to manage your databases.

If you don’t have a backup file and your data is somehow cleared?  You’re screwed.

Automating the backup process

While it is possible to manually back up your data (as described in the MySQL reference manual), this is not ideal.  It requires time every day, and it also requires you to remember to do it every day.  Neither of those are particularly hard, but it’s much easier to just automate the whole thing.

In Linux, you can automate the process using CRON jobs.  In Windows, you will have to create a batch file and tell Windows to run it regularly using the task scheduler.  You can create a batch file using Notepad and the following code:

echo on
FOR /F “TOKENS=1* DELIMS=/ ” %%A IN (‘DATE/T’) DO SET CDATE=%%B
FOR /F “TOKENS=1,2 eol=/ DELIMS=/ ” %%A IN (‘DATE/T’) DO SET dd=%%A
FOR /F “TOKENS=1,2 DELIMS=/ eol=/” %%A IN (‘echo %CDATE%’) DO SET mm=%%A
FOR /F “TOKENS=1,2 DELIMS=/ ” %%A IN (‘echo %CDATE%’) DO SET yyyy=%%B
SET date=%yyyy%%mm%%dd%
mkdir %date%

mysqldump –user USERNAME –password=PASSWORD DATABASE-NAME >%date%\DBdump.sql

Simply copy-paste this into Notepad and save it into the directory you want to folders to be created.  I created a “backup” directory in the MySQL folder in the Program Files directory.

Once the file is completed (you can repeat the mysqldump line for each database you want backed up), edit the filename to read:  mysqldump.bat.   The .bat extension tells Windows that this is a Batch file.

Now you just have to let Windows know you want it to run the file at a certain time each day (or week, or … etc.).  This is actually very very easy.  We’re using Server 2003, but the instructions should be similar (or easy to find) in most other Windows OSes.

1. Open the Control Panel using the Start Bar
2. (a) If you are using category view, select performance and maintenance, then double-click scheduled tasks. (b) If you are using classic view, double-click scheduled tasks.
3. Double-click add scheduled task.
4. This will open the scheduled task wizard.  Click next until the wizard asks you which program to run.
5. Click browse and navigate to the directory where you placed your mysqldump.bat file.  Select this file and click open.
6. Type in a name for the task and select how often you want it to run.   For a MySQL backup dump, you should probably select daily for heavy-use databases, where the information changes often, and weekly for other databases.
7. After you hit next, you will be given more flexibility with the scheduling.  For daily tasks, you can choose weekdays, daily, or every X days.  You can also select the time for the program to run.
8. Next, the system will prompt you for which username you wish to use to run the program.  Make sure the username you select has access to both run the mysqldump command and to create folders and files.
9. Click finish.

That’s it!

Of course, if you really want to be sure that your data is secure, the best thing to do is back up your entire hard drive with an external drive or off-site storage system.  Still, a data dump is a good place to start your data storage practice.

Updates may be sparser than usual over the next few weeks, for several reasons:

1) Work is crazy busy.  Our list of databases mysteriously emptied itself out (SQL Injection attack?) on Thursday, so I spent most of Thursday and Friday restoring from an (unfortunately rather old–mea culpa) SQL dump and making changes to bring it up-to-date again.  I am also trying to finish our e-reserves project and write at least two articles.

2) No Internet at home.  We are moving apartments on the 14th, so will probably not have Internet for most of the month.

As I mentioned in Monday’s blog post, there are a lot of dead social media pages.  How can you (or your library) avoid becoming one of them?

Before you create that Facebook page, Twitter account, or blog, run through the following checklist.  If you find yourself answering “No” to a lot of the questions, it might be wise to reconsider until you’re sure you can populate your new acquisition with actual content on a regular basis.

It’s actually a fairly simple checklist.

Social Media Checklist

• Do you have enough time to update the [social media type] on a regular basis? – For blogs and longer-form social media sites, make sure you leave yourself at least an hour several times a week to keep the site current.  If you’re running a Twitter feed or other similar micro-blogging service, you’ll need to update more often, but it will take less time.  Set aside a few minutes three or four times a day.

• Do you have enough time to set up the [social media type] in the first place? – Similarly, if you don’t have a few hours to get the thing started and populated with basic information (‘about the library’, etc.), you’ll run into trouble.

• Do you have enough content to start your [social media type]? – If you don’t have anything to post, there’s really no need to get involved in most forms of social media.  In many cases, if you only have a limited amount of information, you can just make a static web page and host it on your webspace.  Social media can still be useful for connecting your site with others, though.

• Do you have enough content to update the [social media type] on a regular basis? – For blogs, you should try to update at least once a week if possible.  Remember that this is not only your institution’s connection to the world, but also a way to get people involved in new ways that they wouldn’t otherwise have considered.  Do you have some new books that people might not know about?  A new collection that needs some attention?  Are there any events going on?  Twitter feeds don’t have to contain vital information every single time, but they should update several times a day or you will look out of touch.

As with any cutting-edge implement, the various social media out there can cut their wielders just as much as they attract an audience.

Okay, that metaphor got away from me a bit.  Let’s try this again:

Social Media can be an excellent way to tell people about your library.  However, they can also be an excellent way to appear unconnected, uncaring, and just generally un-useful.

This is similar to the old web advice of not dating your pages if you don’t plan on updating them often.  When a visitor reaches a page that says “last updated January 23rd, 1994″, that visitor is likely to unvisit as rapidly as possible.  And for good reason–who wants to waste their time on something that’s (e.g.) 16 years out of date when the Interwebs’ tubes hold any number of other, more recent variations on a similar topic?

The same is true of social media like Facebook: although having a regularly updated page is great, and may even help out your patrons (ideally the end goal of something like this, after all), a page which you created once because you thought it might be a good idea and then never updated is worse than no page at all.

A dead page suggests that you either are not that interested in connecting with users or–possibly worse–that you don’t know what you’re doing.  The ‘net is littered with un-used blogs [I myself am not guilt-free on that account], empty Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts that say nothing, so perhaps I’m exaggerating the consequences a bit.

But the fact remains: if you don’t have time or the inclination to keep things current, why bother?  There are other, more productive ways to spend those five minutes to an hour it takes to set up on any given social media site.

Even worse is if you do have the inclination and the time, but don’t actually have any content.  There’s only so many instances of “the library closes in 15 minutes” that you can see on one Twitter feed before going cross-eyed, after all.

So how can you avoid this information underload?

Check back on Wednesday for a before-you-[social media] checklist!

Driscoll, L. (2003). Electronic reserve: A manual and guide for library staff members. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Information Press.

This short monograph, much like last week’s Reserves, Electronic Reserves and Copyright, was simultaneously published in Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserve (14.1 (2003)).  Unlike that text, this one is essentially more of a resource containing sample forms and procedures than anything else.

In fact, the first 55 pages of the book do discuss things more abstractly, but they do so in such general terms and so briefly that the discussion is essentially useless–the advice Driscoll offers is pretty much the same advice you would use when planning and implementing any program, even one not at a library.  One snippet of advice is that “it is important for public service desk staff members to demonstrate effective communication skills in their interactions with faculty and students” (9).  Well…  yes.  Otherwise, they wouldn’t be public service staff, right?

Driscoll also includes several sample job descriptions, but these suffer from the same problem, with competencies such as “value the contributions of others” and “demonstrate a consistent focus on minimizing expenses while maximizing results” (12).  These and other truisms pervade the job descriptions, while the parts that do explicitly mention reserves or e-reserves seem to do so just to make it clear what kind of job you’re applying for.  (e.g. “Understand how reserves are organized and accessed within the library”, also on p12.)

This goes on for 34 pages.  Chapter 3 deals with copyright in what the author admits is a “very brief” fashion (37) and readers can probably find more pertinent (and up-to-date) resources online to replace the charts and information in this part of the book.  (for instance, the excellent Digital Copyright Slider and other tools from librarycopyright.net)

So, setting aside slightly more than the first half of the book as not really helpful, what does that get you, the librarian who wants to know about e-reserves?

In short:  sample policies and forms.

• Page 54-59 include FAQs from faculty which may still prove useful now, 7 years after the book’s publication date.
• The Appendix, spanning pages 61-86, has several forms which will probably be helpful to libraries which are just trying to get started on an e-reserves project, although some parts of this appendix should be heartily ignored.  (e.g. the bizarre “determining fair use” workflow chart, which should be replaced with this Fair Use Evaluator tool from librarycopyright.net)
• A glossary for the utterly clueless

To be fair, this book is close to ten years old.  I suspect that the rapid obsolescence of technology is what the author had in mind when she created the vague job descriptions and advice in the first half of the book.  Unfortunately, while this means that the book does not indeed make reference to outdated technologies, it also makes much of the book of limited use.