TechEssence.info

Concerns about online privacy have recently surfaced again in the news, fueled this type by the meteoric rise of social networking sites like MySpace and disclosure (intentionally or unintentionally) of potentially sensitive information such as that recently by AOL. Libraries have historically been strong advocates of their patrons' right to privacy, as evidenced by the following text appearing as #3 in the ALA Code of Ethics:

Summary

Electronic Resource Management (ERM) describes software used to manage digital subscriptions in libraries. Typically, the routines include subscription product names, descriptions, producer, aggregator, license start and end dates, renewal alerts, images of contracts, price and payment terms, payment records, access URLs, usernames and passwords, interface administrative URLs, verification access methods, access restrictions, vendor contacts, contact history, and links to usage reports.

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.

On my other blog, Information Wants to Be Free, I recently wrote about what library school doesn’t (but should) teach students to prepare them for 21st century librarianship. One of the things I brought up was the importance of keeping up with new technologies and developments in our field and related fields.

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!

Executive Summary

Tagging refers to the process by which users assign terms meaningful to them to a resource in the online environment. The rise of social bookmarking Web sites have skyrocketed tagging systems into the mainstream.

I was working on developing a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for a client recently and ended up finding some useful information on the topic in general. There is a lot of good information available about SLAs as it fits into the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) model. ITIL is a British creation and much more popular on the other side of the ocean. Microsoft has a similar model called the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). I found the ITIL model more flexible so I'm focusing on that model. However in both ITIL and MOF, the Service Level Agreement is an important component of IT service management and I believe librareis would benefit from developing SLAs between their IT (information technology) service provider and the various departments that rely on that service. Thus this entry....

Executive Summary

The Web is an amazing source of information on just about every subject imaginable. Increasingly, people are depending on the Web for news, professional development and education. In light of the continuous growth of the Web, it has become difficult to keep up with all of the news stories covered, scholarly studies published, and blog posts written. If you want to know what’s going on in the world or in your field, you may have to visit countless websites every day or you risk missing potentially important information. Many people have a list of sources that they regularly look to for news and information. However, as the number of useful Web sites grows, users find it increasingly difficult to visit all of the pages every day. In addition, some Web sites and blogs are not updated with any regularity. There is a way to keep up with online content from dozens or hundreds of Web sites on a single page. This technology, RSS, is essentially the antidote to information overload.

Dorothea Salo has already written an introduction to Unicode with some mention of UTF-8, but let me do a little venting here. There’s some dense technical detail here (or maybe I’m the one who’s being dense); the “so what?” part is at the end.

A few days ago, Dorothea recommended some terrific books on information architecture and usable design. Usability basically means how easy and enjoyable it is to use a particular tool (which can be measured for anything from a computer to a rake to a building). If you find that your toaster oven is difficult to use, you can’t figure out which knobs do what, and you can never remember which setting makes your toast perfectly toasted, then it has poor usability. When libraries talk about usability, they are usually referring to the online interfaces our patrons utilize. Some of these interfaces are quite usable, but the majority are not. Many of our online databases and catalogs are not intuitive to use, do not contain sufficiently simple documentation to explain how to use them, and are not designed to match the user’s expectations based on the interfaces they use every day (Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, etc.). Jakob Nielsen, an expert on the subject of usability, has developed ten heuristics for evaluating user interfaces. They include a "match between system and real world," "error prevention," "recognition rather than recall," and "help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors." If your Web site, catalog, and online databases actually satisfy these ten heuristics, then you’re in great shape. Unfortunately, most online library resources don’t.

One thing that is too often ignored in all this talk about Web usability is the terminology librarians use without even thinking about it, both in our everyday speech and on our Web sites. Librarians speak their own antiquated little language and sometimes we forget that our patrons don’t. If patrons are confronted with terms they don’t know on your Web site, how likely is it that they will be successful in completing the task they came there for. And consequently, how likely is it that they’ll ever come back?