Mobile is blowing up right now. The success of the iPhone and the Android operating system has forced educators and librarians to acknowledge this growing group of users. Now, suddenly, it seems that everyone is talking about it -on the list serves, in conference presentations, on online forums.
Mike and I started monitoring what sort of traffic was visiting the site last month. We weren’t surprised to find that we were being hit by lots of mobile devices. That is both good and bad. It is good in that students are using their handheld devices to find out more information on the library, and bad because we are ill equipped to deal with these users. Our current site isn’t mobile friendly. It is too link heavy and the print is too small. So, we started toying with a mobile redesign.
This is where we are right now. We are going for something with big buttons that are easy to press on a touch phone. We are also trying to feature services that users are most interested in up top, with those that are still in development on the bottom.
Mike and I attended an Illuminate session put on by Educause last week. In the session a group of mobile developers from North Carolina State University Library showed off their mobile site and shared some of the things that they learned. They said that known item searches were the most common -mainly books. They also said that students were interested in things like hours and computer availablity. They didn’t design anything new for the phone, rather they just optimized their current site for mobile users. What they kept saying was “mobilization, not microzation.” They said to focus on only essential relevant content, and to not bother with things like advanced search tools. They suggested that developers start with the services that make mobile sense, and limit the scope of information delivered. Lastly, they advised developers to talk to students and “get a reality check.”
This session was illuminating (see how I worked in the product name there?) because it confirmed that Mike and I were on the right track. We were already doing most of the things that they suggested. In our design scheme we tried to put things like hours right up front. We also made access to online help, via Libraryh3lp, one of the first things the user sees. Once we get Find Books going we will move it up too. Right now we are hampered by the fact that we can’t remove the CSS from the file, so we are not getting a good mobile display of our Find Books product. The site is hosted elsewhere, so we are stuck with the full version for now. Hopefully that will change soon.
In the meantime, I think that this thing is ready to go as a beta project. With just a few more tweaks here and there it should be ready for the public. As always, stay tuned….
Oh, and here are some of the links that the boys at North Carolina State University supplied us with:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mobilepress/ - a site that helps with blog mobilization
http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=M-Libraries - the mobile libraries wiki
http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/ -an XML configuration file which contains information about capabilities and features of many mobile devices. It helps you tell what each phone is capable of handling. This is helpful when determining what to display.
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/2055 -a useful article from code4lib on mobile development.
This morning we launched a new version of Find Databases, our database discovery tool. With input from various individuals throughout the Library Mike B and I worked to refine the existing DBAZ interface into a streamlined and powerful discovery tool. The latest edition builds upon the previous format and cleans up some of the problem areas. We made sure to keep to the same basic design scheme, so most users will have little difficulty adjusting to the changes we have made.
This video details some of the changes we have made (I made this video for the librarians here, so some of the comments are directed to them):
At the Internet Librarian Conference in Monterey, I saw a presentation titled “Information Literacy With Videocasts, Wiimotes, and Interactive Whiteboards.” Three librarians, Shu Qian, Steve Borrelli, and
May Chang, detailed how they created a large, interactive whiteboard using only a Wii Remote, a Bluetooth adapter and an infrared pen. Using the technology in the Wii remote they were able to turn virtually any surface of any size into a whiteboard. This freed them from the tyrany of the podium. They weren’t chained to the mouse during their instruction sessions because they were able to interact with the web pages they were displaying by using the wireless infrared lightpen.
The idea behind this project came from Johnny Chung Lee, a researcher from Microsoft. Here is a video that explains how it all works:
We are going to try this out at the Pollak library. The project should cost next to nothing, because I already have a Wii Remote and all of the computers in our instruction rooms are already equipped with Bluetooth adapters. The only investment in the experiment will be time and the $18 we just spent on an infrared pen.
Once the infrared pen arrives (hopefully this week) we will load the free software on one of the instruction room computers. Then I will bring in my Wiimote and we will give this thing a go. If it is successful, I’ll show it to the instruction librarians and check on their interest in the project. If they like it then we can purchase our own Wiimote (I’ll give mine back to my kid) and some mounting hardware. Even then, the total expenditure will be in the neighborhood of $50.
I am totally stoked on this. More to come.
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Internet Librarian 2009 -Super Searcher Tips
0 Comments | Posted by admin in Internet Librarian 2009
Mary Ellen Bates did her annual presentation on what’s new with the web. This is always one of the most informative sessions at the conference.
- Google.com/squared –Works for categories of things. It creates the beging of a value added item. It structures search data in table form. “a visualization is worth a thousand words.” So, if a user was looking for arthritis drugs, Google creates a table on the fly, generated algorythmicly, with relevant information on the topic. It columnizes relevant data and allows for user overwriting. This can then be exported to Excel.
- Wolframalpha.com –It indexes systematic knowledge, so it works great for structured data. It is not so much what it finds, but what it does with what it finds. It displays datasets in a way that can be easily digested.
- Google Show options –on the upper right hand side of a results screen, you can click on show options to get a different display of search results. Images from the pages can be displayed, or more text can be added.
- OneRiot –Crawls links people share on Social Networking Site. It is indexing all of the links people send in tweets, not the tweets themselves. You can sort by realtime to get the most current buzz, or search by pulse to get the most popular links.
- Search Cloudlet –Firefox add-on that generates frequency results from your search results on the fly. It creates a word cloud on every page that is returned. It is smart enough to eliminate words that are on every single page. For example, if you search for health insurance, it won’t throw those words into the tag cloud, but it will add the word “doctor” or “health care provider” to the cloud.
- Twitter searches –There are lots of ways to “get rid of the garbage” and find information that is relevant. There are lots of filter options on the search page. Use them. Also, you can use the term filter:links to search only tweets that have links in them.
- University Channel –It is a university consortium for videos. It compiles lectures, conferences and panels. It is a pretty crude search tool on top of a bunch of good data.
- Bing.com/visualsearch –It is a search that displays results visually. So, if you search for yoga poses, you get a bunch of images that show the poses.
- Google Hacks –Set an alert on twitter (site:twitter.com) and look for the word favorites. It will pull all of the favorite links by twitterers.
- Google Domestic Trends –This tracks querries over time. You get a graphical representation of searches over time. You can enter multiple search terms so that you can find data correlations.
- Ms office tabs –create tabs in Microsoft office applications!
