TechEssence.info

Reading the MIRACLE project report on institutional repositories today, I came across a survey question that asked respondents to rate various factors involved in choosing a repository platform. The exact phrasing of one factor: "Adherence to open-access standards."

This betrays a common and sometimes distracting confusion, which I will try to clear up.

Many libraries may wonder whether on-staff web-design expertise is truly necessary, given the proliferation of content-management systems and WYSIWYG tools such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

I'm here to say—maybe.

The tangle of cords under the printer station has gotten out of hand. The server keeps crashing, and you can't get it fixed fast enough. You want an institutional repository, and someone to run it. Your web page is a disaster. Whatever the reason, you want a systems librarian.

Or do you?

MARC, MODS, MARCXML, TEI, EAD, Dublin Core, METS, RDF, topic maps, ETD-MS... metadata standards abound. How to pick the right ones?

Shockingly, technical merit is close to the bottom of the decision stack. Many other concerns come first.

Now that TechEssence has had a chance to settle down to business, it seems a good opportunity to canvass readers about topics they'd like to see us address. I know we've got some left over from last time, but I also suspect that new readers have new ideas. Please, leave a comment with yours!

With Roy's gracious permission, I am going to hijack TechEssence briefly to canvass its readership about a potential conference-related set of online-only tutorials and workshops. If you couldn't be more horrified by the idea, pray accept my apologies for disturbing you and go on to the next post.

I am not actually a very good information architect. Well, I'm not actually an information architect at all. So pontificating about information architecture would be more than a little presumptuous of me. Instead, I'll recommend you some of the books and websites I've read, liked, and used. I hope they'll get you started.

My local public library has a survey up about its website. I took it. I was, shall we say, not complimentary (though I was constructive). My local public library's website requires four clicks at the least just to get to a catalog search box.

I'm guessing your library's website isn't quite that bad. Still, one of these days you'll be reworking it, and that's a scary, scary project. How do you even get started?

The current discussion over technology not working as hoped during ALA's Library 2.0 BootCamp gives me to ponder over how best to react when a technology fails or underperforms. Certainly, all due diligence should be performed so that technologies don't fail—but look, sometimes they will; they're created by humans, and humans are imperfect.

How does a library best recover from a technology failure?

Meredith's excellent post about acquiring staff buy-in caused a commenter to raise a related question: how to get buy-in from the higher rungs of the ladder.

As with anything, there's no one foolproof way. Evaluate any strategy suggested in light of what you know about your library's administration. That said, here are a few things that have worked for me and folks I know.