• An article published in Code4Lib Journal called “User-Centered Design and Agile Development: Rebuilding the Swedish National Union Catalog“.

“Finally, we would like to conclude that working with user-centred design in combination with iterative development is a better, faster and cheaper way of software development, compared to traditional models. Better – the product being released at the end is a more up-to-date and bug-free version than had we worked with a more traditional approach. Faster – it is our conviction that with traditional methodology we would not have finished on time, or at least not with the same amount of features implemented. Cheaper – if the same number of people are able to do a better job in a shorter amount of time, it is a more cost-effective way of getting the job done.”

• A fascinating look at the trend of using social proof to help develop AI in robots. This is only tangentially related to libraries, but I do think there’s a connection.
• ACRL has published a new book titled Academic Library Research: Perspectives and Current Trends

Part II features two chapters on recently developing evaluation methods, including usability testing and measuring library service quality through LibQUAL+. “Academic Library Research” is designed to be useful to scholars, practitioners, students and others interested in current trends in academic library research.

I doubt this is the seminal instance, but I just heard an interesting On the Media podcast which talked to Cal Tech economics professor R. Preston McAfee about his textbook Introduction to Economic Analysis (ISBN 160049000X) which he has released using a creative commons license. This touches tangentially on a recent post I had on self-published fiction, but it makes me wonder about academic work. I do believe that this is the way to go (now and in the future) but there has to be a method somehow for this type of scholarly activity to be recognized in the tenure process.

On a side note, the ISBN is not represented in OCLC’s Worldcat under that number. The only way I could find it is via OCLC number 62280521. There are all kinds of problems involved in self-publishing.

Ithaka has released an interesting study it has been working with since 2000 on academic libraries and faculty perceptions. What I like most from this is a useful model of academic library services that they’ve broken into three aspects: purchaser, archive, and gateway. They describe these as:

The purchaser role was described in the survey by the statement “the library pays for resources I need, from academic journals to books to electronic databases,” the archive role by “the library serves as a repository of resources – in other words, it archives, preserves, and keeps track of resources,” and the gateway role by “the library is a starting point or ‘gateway’ for locating information for my research.”

It’s certainly not a surprise that the library as gateway is being disrupted by public search services in the minds of faculty. This is evident in the findings where faculty are decreasingly likely to rate gateway services as “very important”:

I’ll be honest, the first thing I think of regarding gateway services is federated searching. It’s not surprising that faculty are considering this service as decreasingly important. The fact that 60% still think it’s very important leads me to believe (hope) that there is still time to address the problem. Another facet is that the science grouping, followed by social science, is leading this trend:

It makes sense that everyone values the “buyer” aspects of libraries. But in terms of gateway services, the humanities may still be reliant on libraries because of a preference for monographs. If the Kindle, or something similar, starts to gain traction then the humanities may follow science’s lead in finding their own gateway services.

There is a lot more to the study and it is well worth a read. They recommend shoring up the visibility of library services, concentrating and customizing for different faculty user groups, and taking advantage of network solutions (especially for smaller libraries.)

For the past year I’ve been working on a project using Archive.org to categorize a sub-set of academic library home pages according to their browse and search structures. Next week I’ll present this data at ALA during the Monday 6/26 poster session at 1pm. But for now, here’s a quick overview of some of the findings. This is an update to the data presented last year (2006) at Internet Librarian.

Methodology: Using Archive.org and Google’s list of academic websites, I semi-randomly selected a group of websites (around 276) to see how their browse structure and search placement was organized. The goal was to analyze a group of libraries from a wide cross-section of resource-enabled entities in order to get an idea of how the library community is thinking about library website design. Here is how the various categories were broken down:

Browse strategies: (i.e. if there’s such a thing as “browse DNA”, what is it? I personally don’t have a preference between these two groupings.)

• Splash home pages: (i.e. the top page browse structure disappears once secondary pages are reached)
  • Grid: Home page links are grouped along an x:y axis
    • random example: http://library.csudh.edu/
  • Cascade: Links are grouped in a cascading structure either along the x or y axis
    • random example: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/
  • Radial: Links are grouped along the radius of a circle
    • random example: http://library.hartford.edu/

• Frame home pages: (i.e. the browse structure is persistent from the the top page to the secondary pages)
  • random example: http://www.ulib.niu.edu/

Search strategies: (i.e. how is search implemented from the home page?)

• None: search might be available, but it’s usually a text link
  • random example: http://lib.harvard.edu/
• Site-search: search box that searches the library site, but not catalog
  • random example: http://www.library.eku.edu/
• Catalog: search box that searches the catalog
  • random example: http://library.citytech.cuny.edu/
• Site/catalog: search box that searches either the site, catalog, database(s), or all of the above
  • random example: http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/

Browse Findings: (the “error” result indicates a problem with archive.org data)

When I started this, I expected to find the “grid” structure to be gaining in popularity. I was surprised to see that the idea of persistent framing is definitely a trend with legs. When grid, cascade, and radial are combined (as “splash”) the trend is still there, and still surprising:

Search Findings: Here’s the results for search placement on the home page. There’s a definite trend towards placing a one-stop search box directly on the top page, where patrons won’t have to click through to use:

Conclusion: The way things are going, if you’ve embarked upon a library site redesign you would have the most company if you adopted a persistent browse structure with a comprehensive search box located on the home page.

Data:

This library website analysis data [2007 Academic Library Website Analysis (spreadsheet)] is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The same goes with all images above, as well as the original list of library websites found here.