TechEssence.info

The VirtualHosting.com site recently posted an article titled "Test your Website: A 57-Point Checklist for Maximum Usability" that summarizes a number of things to think about, each of which is linked to a different source that discusses that issue in depth. For anyone wanting to make sure their site is up to snuff, it's worth checking this out.

While you're there, you may also want to poke around a bit. Other articles that may be useful to you include "Microformats University" and even "Top 25 (Non-Obvious) Ways RSS Can Make Your Life Easier".

All in all, a site worth keeping your eye on.

I was just reading about the Defrag Conference and wringing my hands that not a single librarian was represented among the speakers. Here's what defrag says about their conference:

Defrag is the first conference focused solely on the tools and technologies that are leveraging the "social" aspect of software to accelerate the "aha" moment. Defrag is not a version number. Rather it’s a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, builders and thinkers that are working on the next wave of software innovation.

The conference is about software innovation but it is also about how we deal with the abundance of information facing us (and our users) and how best to filter, organize and interact with that information and the user. Anybody else deal with information retrieval and/or user interface design in library school?

I've been using the expression "learned helplessness" a lot lately because that's how I see the situation libraries have found themselves in after a decade of integrated library systems.

I find it particularly disturbing because so much of the work I do seems to bump into roadblocks that point squarely at the ILS. And worse than the roadblock is the shoulder shrugging of so many of the library folk using that ILS software.

Too many worthy projects have died because the currently available integrated library systems (ILS) available today from commercial, proprietary vendors don't and won't support libraries and the services they've like to be providing to their customers.

I saw a note come through recently about a server that the University of Cincinnati Libraries had set up to be a "sandbox". What this means is that it is a place where new software (particularly open source software) can be installed for staff to investigate.

The sole admonition is to "Play nice together" and it currently has such applications as Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, WordPress, phpWiki, Tiki, and Moodle installed, among others.

I think this ia a wonderful idea and I'm glad to see that the University of Cincinnati Libraries takes their responsibility to help its staff learn new technologies seriously. I wish that more of our institutions did so.

Jessica Hupp at VirtualHosting.com has put together an amazing list of web

Library Journal picked up on the Talis podcast about the Library Software Manifesto

Yes, the server was hacked recently, and as soon as I discovered it to be the case I backed up the data, wiped it, and reinstalled all the software.

The folks at Talis pulled together a group of knowledgeable folks to discuss the Library Software Manifesto published here at TechEssence.info. It has now been published on the Talking with Talis web site as a podcast.

Last week I gave a talk at the 2007 CODI Conference (Customers of Dynix, Inc.). I had decided to take as my topic a "library software manifesto" in which I would outline the rights and responsibilities of libraries and library software vendors. I posted about this on the Code4Lib mailing list and used some of the resulting comments in the resulting Library Software Manifesto published on this site.

Should you focus your efforts on a smaller number of really big technology projects, or a larger number of smaller projects? Of course there is no one right answer for all institutions, and it’s likely no institution would rely on one approach to the exclusion of the other. But it can be difficult to find the right balance between the large-scale, high-impact initiatives and those that are more nimble and quick to appear.